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(Archived) Image Encryption


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hi,

Evernote is getting better and better and with support for the iPhone you really hit the bullseye.

Finally i just switched completely from SOHO Notes to Evernote. The only thing i'm missing now is the ability to encrypt not only text but also images. Will this be supported in a later version?

best,

rainer/ berlin/ europe.

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  • 2 years later...
Any changes here? Some time passed since this topic was created and image encryption seems still not working. What is the current situation now in this topic?

Image encryption seems to be something that is clearly impossible for the Evernote developers, let alone any other developing studio out there. To have the ability to retain the text-recognition, image clarity, and an uncorrupted file from the encryption would be an impossible task for anyone to achieve.

As much as I'd like to have image encryption as a feature in Evernote, I don't think it'll be possible for any software vendor out there to do such things (Storing images in a Truecrypt file doesn't count; That's encrypting an image that is in a disk image, and not encrypting the actual image itself.) until a genius out there is able to find an easy way to do this.

(Encryption requires scrambling up the original file using a key - For example, text encryption would take quite a lot of stuff if you have a long passage. Imagine having to do the same thing for an image - Each separate pixel with a unique colour in the image, and the whole image file is composed of thousands of these (I suppose.), and you'd have to scramble all this up with a key... ... Not really possible, I think.)

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??? Certainly you can encrypt images. You can encrypt anything digital -- they're just strings of bits. I think that what Dave is getting at is that once you've encrypted an image, the OCR software can't get at it, but then again, the search indexing also can't take into account encrypted text, so maybe there's a deeper issue as to why Evernote seems reluctant -- currently -- to add this.

~Jeff

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Well, I think the best solution would be to let us choose if we want the image encrypted but not indexed or the opposite. I'd like to have some images totally safe and free from others seeing them but can't do it right now. It seems like a weird limitation to me :/

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I'd like to have some images totally safe and free from others seeing them but can't do it right now.

Sure you can, if you have a premium account. Use something like Winrar to zip & encrypt the file & then put it into Evernote. Then you can view the file on any computer that can unzip that particular file type.

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I'd like to have some images totally safe and free from others seeing them but can't do it right now.

Sure you can, if you have a premium account. Use something like Winrar to zip & encrypt the file & then put it into Evernote. Then you can view the file on any computer that can unzip that particular file type.

??? Certainly you can encrypt images. You can encrypt anything digital -- they're just strings of bits. I think that what Dave is getting at is that once you've encrypted an image, the OCR software can't get at it, but then again, the search indexing also can't take into account encrypted text, so maybe there's a deeper issue as to why Evernote seems reluctant -- currently -- to add this.

~Jeff

The methods that you guys have said are encrypting them within a container and not encrypting the image itself on it's own, as I said in my previous post. For example, text itself is encrypted because it is relatively easier to encrypt the letters of the alphabet with a key compared to possibly millions of pixels within an image. Even if encrypting an image is possible within Evernote, searching through it would be impossible - The program would have to decrypt the image to find the OCRed text, and considering how much processing power, if possible, image encryption would get, search using the algorithm through the image, and then re-encrypt the image again.

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Even if encrypting an image is possible within Evernote, searching through it would be impossible

Yes, that's a given.

The program would have to decrypt the image to find the OCRed text, and considering how much processing power, if possible, image encryption would get, search using the algorithm through the image, and then re-encrypt the image again.

If it's securely encrypted in the way most valid encryption programs work, this would not be possible, period, at all, since EN servers would not have access to the encryption key & therefore not able to decrypt. (Just like Truecrypt, Amazon S3 & even EN's own text encryption - you forget your password then you are SOL.)

I do think some people want their encrypted stuff to be indexed (not possible as discussed above) and some are willing to not have it indexed but just want it encrypted.

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??? Certainly you can encrypt images. You can encrypt anything digital -- they're just strings of bits. I think that what Dave is getting at is that once you've encrypted an image, the OCR software can't get at it, but then again, the search indexing also can't take into account encrypted text, so maybe there's a deeper issue as to why Evernote seems reluctant -- currently -- to add this.

The methods that you guys have said are encrypting them within a container and not encrypting the image itself on it's own, as I said in my previous post. For example, text itself is encrypted because it is relatively easier to encrypt the letters of the alphabet with a key compared to possibly millions of pixels within an image.

Again, text is no easier to encrypt than binary data; it's all just a string of bits (or bytes) to the encryption routine. That there may be more pixels is a different issue; there may be a large amount of text as well -- that's just linear scaling. And all of that applies to text or images within a container: Evernote already does text; it could as easily do images, unless there's some deeper implications that Dave didn't specify.

Even if encrypting an image is possible within Evernote, searching through it would be impossible - The program would have to decrypt the image to find the OCRed text, and considering how much processing power, if possible, image encryption would get, search using the algorithm through the image, and then re-encrypt the image again.

Yes, the fact that you can't OCR encrypted images is known and understood and has been mentioned in this thread previously. For that matter, you can't index encrypted text on the server side anyways, since they can't decrypt it: only you can. The same would apply to images: only you know the key, so only you can decrypt.

~Jeff

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Even if encrypting an image is possible within Evernote, searching through it would be impossible - The program would have to decrypt the image to find the OCRed text, and considering how much processing power, if possible, image encryption would get, search using the algorithm through the image, and then re-encrypt the image again.

Yes, the fact that you can't OCR encrypted images is known and understood and has been mentioned in this thread previously. For that matter, you can't index encrypted text on the server side anyways, since they can't decrypt it: only you can. The same would apply to images: only you know the key, so only you can decrypt.

It's broader than just OCR ... our servers couldn't do anything with such an image in any context that you'd expect to work. You couldn't access this note from any web-based interface, because our servers wouldn't be able to give out the image for display within a web browser. Many mobile clients would similarly be unable to display the note in the context you expect.

If you really want to store a completely opaque blob of data within Evernote that we have no way to inspect or process, you could use an encrypted (i.e. password-protected) PDF within your account. That seems to do what you're describing ... that PDF can only be opened and viewed in certain contexts, on computers that can open that PDF in external PDF viewers.

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This isn't really my case, though I seem to have taken up the cudgels, foolhardily or not, but I'm guessing that someone who encrypted an image wouldn't want it to be seen as an image on any client, unless it were decrypted. In other words, when I encrypt some text, it appears as a button that I can click on to decrypt the text and make it visible to me, and I'd expect a similar behavior with an encrypted image. Makes me wonder whether there would be a problem distinguishing between an encrypted image and a normal image in the ENML.

But no big deal; it's something I never needed myself, and there's a workaround, so I'll just let this one sit...

~Jeff

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