this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Encrypted website (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hiya People!

I have, for some time, had a specific problem in mind. I cannot, for the life of me, think of a better group to tell me my idea is crap.

In any case, I have a personal knowledge base I host facing the internet on a VPS. It is perfect for me, accessible, based on dokuwiki so its really easy to backup entire installation, the works. It is setup as a private wiki, so login is mandatory for viewing, editing, etc.

What I am looking for is mechanism for encrypting the data on the webserver when the user is not logged in. Under this scheme, the content of the server would be encrypted, only to be decrypted by the authorised password and encrypted again upon logout (or timeout).

Does this make sense? are there solutions like this out there?

I will attempt writing a plugin for dokuwiki, just wanted to make sure there is something out there that solves this problem in general.

Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What you want is called client side encryption. Everything on the server cannot be read. Everything is encrypted until it is actually on the client computer.

Lucky for you there is already a plugin for that.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:dokucrypt2

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Cheers! I actually use this for some encryption here and there. My thought was more along the lines of the entire content. Server side.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I think this plugin is probably the best you're gonna get. It encrypts and decrypts on client side. So the data that is transmitted and stored in dokuwiki is already encrypted before it even hits the server, so data on server side at all times is encrypted. So even if an attacker gets access to the VPS, the data there is encrypted and they have no way of knowing what passphrase was used for the encryption as it not stored/configured on server side.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just to add some clarification. Client side encryption basically means that all of the content on the server is always encrypted (or at least it is once it’s been saved on a client using client side encryption).

The whole point is that the server is entirely unable to decrypt the data - there’s no possibility of some cached credentials being used to decrypt the data when you aren’t logged in, there’s no risk of accidental decryption keys being saved in log files. All the decryption takes place on the client and any bad actors would need to compromise your local PC to get access to your data.

Done right this is the best solution for what you are looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

In case anyone was wondering. I implemented a small php function. It uses aes 256 with a sha256 key “derivation” to encrypt things.

I choose the key when encrypting, and force encryption upon logout.

Cheers!