End-to-end encryption in Bear (With Advanced Data Protection)

Bear feedback Feature Request
1

I spend some time researching whether Bear supports E2EE (if you turn on Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, perhaps).

The only official answer I found was a reddit post here and a dev comment here about backwards compatability

The answer seems to be “no we don’t support and E2E encryption, and we do not have any current plans to support it”

I want to add an official feature request here so folks can weigh in and vote for it (thumbs up).

Notes are some of the most important information I have. I use Bear for everything work and personal. I would feel a lot better if it were end to end encrypted and I knew I was the only one who could ever access it.

14 Likes
2

I would absolutely second this. I get the reason why it’s troublesome to implement (it excludes older operating systems), but surely at some point in the not-too-distant future Apple will force ADP anyways.

I admire that the Bear team is dedicated to security/privacy, and completely transparent about these features and stances. And I know that just using non-ADP iCloud is a big level of trust above other note-taking services that use AWS or other commercial cloud as backing storage, but it still seems like something that should be on their roadmap and in their plans.

That’s my .02… great work so far Bear team!

1 Like
3

Yes. Absolutely second this.

4

This is a must.

I don’t see why this can’t be a checkbox in the preferences only available to people that are on a certain OS level.

2 Likes
5

Plus one to this request.

I have enabled ADP and would strongly prefer that my notes were e2e encrypted during sync. So many breaches nowadays…

To be clear, I don’t care if they are encrypted locally at rest. I’m fine with the notes database not being encrypted. (That’s why I have FileVault enabled.)

But I would really prefer if they could be e2e encrypted during sync.

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6

Bear said there are still users using iOS 16.2 or below without ADP, so I guess they don’t want to lose some users?

Is it possible to have an option in settings so that people can choose to turn on ADP or not? In order to be compatible with all iOS versions?

2 Likes
7

I would hope this is possible! I’m sure it’s more complicated than that under the hood, though. Hope the devs can weigh in.

1 Like
8

This is much needed!

Currently, I have to choose between encrypting notes and being able to add attachments and use full library search.

ADP compatibility would finally solve this issue.

I think some people in another thread ( Will Bear get zero knowledge encryption with iCloud Advanced Data Protection?) already suggested that devs can make ADP opt-in — so that users with older OS versions won’t be affected by the new feature.

Hope we’ll get an update from the devs soon…

2 Likes