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Still confused about the safety of encryption


thewolfe70

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I have Evernote on my PC and iPhone.

 

If I encrypt a note on my PC is there away for anyone to see it without knowing my encryption password?

 

If someone got my Evernote database from my PC can they "see" my encrypted notes?

 

If they hack the Evernote site, can they "see" my encrypted notes?

 

If the notes are not safe for some reason that your aware of, is there a way to make the encrypted notes safe?

 

Same question go for my iPhone.

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Hi. It's actually quite simple -- nothing is safe. 

 

1. You can encrypt text (only text) with Evernote and it will be protected by 128-bit AES encryption. This is a recent improvement over the weak encryption that used to be offered. Encrypted text will be protected from most unauthorized access. But, not all. This is the case for any encryption option, and I don't know of anything 100% "safe"  http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-can-crack-almost-any-type-of-encryption-1258954266

 

2. Macfort doesn't make sense to me. If you use FileVault (free and already installed) to encrypt your Mac, then everything (including Evernote) is encrypted. However, neither FileVault nor Macfort can do anything about the data you sync to Evernote's servers. That will be unencrypted unless you use options #1 or #3. The same holds true for any encryption option you choose for Windows. 

 

3. You can encrypt data (a PDF, for example) before you put it into Evernote.

 

Personally, I am hoping to see a zero-knowledge notebook-level encryption option from Evernote someday. For now, if you handle confidential information that is not your own, the best thing to do is to keep it off the cloud (in any form). This makes it considerably less likely that you will run into any problems, but it is also quite inconvenient, and does not take advantage of Evernote's strengths. See my blog post here for more:

 

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1605

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3. You can encrypt data (a PDF, for example) before you put it into Evernote.

What software would be used to do the above?

 

 

 

If you're creating a PDF file,  encryption is (probably) one of the options in your file editor.  Any Office documents can be encrypted on saving,  and Adobe Acrobat does the job for me on PDFs.

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I use Nitro PDF Reader (Free) so that won't work.

 

Is there a way to encrypt pictures (png, gif...) before adding them to Evernote.

 

How about files before adding them to Evernote.

 

And to reiterate....encrypting text using Evernote is as safe as anything?

 

What about TrueCrypt?

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I use Nitro PDF Reader (Free) so that won't work.

Is there a way to encrypt pictures (png, gif...) before adding them to Evernote.

How about files before adding them to Evernote.

And to reiterate....encrypting text using Evernote is as safe as anything?

What about TrueCrypt?

You can encrypt anything, but will need the software. Maybe the Windows folks here can make suggestions, but you could also Google "windows file encryption" (without the quotation marks) to see some options.

Evernote uses 128-bit encryption, and this is a level of security often found on the Internet. I typically encrypt my PDFs with 256-bit encryption, which is stronger. You could use something even stronger than that, if you want. If you Google "encryption advice" you'll find some useful data.

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