Quick Index
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this free?
Well, at the moment it is completely free and built to run on extremely low cost infrastructure. If traffic increases to a point that the cost is no longer negligible then the app may need to be either ad supported or become something of a freemium service with accounts/quotas and possible subscription tiers Are my notes actually encrypted?
Yes, the notes are stored using an AES encryption scheme and are completely unidentifiable within the database, furthermore each note has a unique encryption key adding another layer of protection. Additionally the database has its own encryption scheme layered on top to encrypt the hashes created through the AES step. The data cannot be read through the database, only the application has the needed permissions and order of operations to resolve the values and then deletes them as the unencryption operations work. What happens to my note if I never follow the link?
Notes can be deleted by a timer process that runs every hour. If the note is older than 3 days, then the job will permanently delete it. Why is the character limit on a note 2750?
This actually aligns with cost to host this app. Since this is a free service, I did not create the database table to allow unlimited data to be stored in the encrypted data column. This number also might seem sort of arbitrary but it is because when the note is encrypted the length grows, so I found that this length behaved in accordance with the database constraint. At a later date, I may reconfigure or lift the limit. Are the contents of my note logged?
No. The only logs we keep are analytics based because this was made by engineers - we love data. We have a table that captures when notes are created, destroyed, whether or not they were password protected, read, or simply timed out. This is so we can potentially make assertions about how the platform is being used, because since the notes themselves are 100% purged from the system after being read or timing out, we have no way to count the number generated in a month, etc. Eventually we plan on exposing this analytics data on this site as well, it's a work in progress. Usage Analytics How this Application Works
This web application takes text messages and encrypts them into a database. Getting into the details, this operation is achieved by leveraging an symmetric encryption algorithm (AES) whereby this application can encrypt and decrypt your message through a known procedure using uniquely generated keys.
Create Note Sequence Diagram
For transparency, this is the high level of how creating a note is accomplished, however for the sake of security of your notes, the details will be limited.
Fetch Note Sequence Diagram
Timer Application Operation
I decided against a diagram for this as the operation is dead simple.
- Perform a database lookup to find all notes from the database that were created more than 3 days ago
- Important: this does not decrypt them. The Timer application does not have the ability to decrypt the data at all.
- Did any notes get returned? Yes, delete them.
- Log the completion of the operation