Encryption support

[fellowseb]

Hi !

Are there any plans to add native encryption support to the buckets; or has it being at least considered ?
Came here from this indexedDb PR remark.

Thanks for the great work !

[ayuishii]

Hi, thanks for expressing interest in this feature!
Encryption is being considered but as an addition in a separate explainer.
Do you mind sharing the use case you had in mind?

[fellowseb]

I'm currently working on a Password Manager application that runs either in a WebExtension (using the chrome.storage api for storage) or as a webapp (using indexedDb for storage). Of course, everything we persist locally needs to be ciphered.
With the arrival of Google's Manifest V3 spec for Web Extensions we are trying to find ways to make storing the users' data faster.
I don't have a particular issue/example at hands to be honest; I just wanted to get some information about this promising feature that are storage buckets :).

[christianliebel]

I would just like to briefly mention that we hear about this requirement very often. Some of our customers process personal data that should not remain in plain text on the device.

[MrAntix]

My use case would be a PWA which needs to store sensitive information for use offline.

Making an encrypted store available would be a great boost for business facing PWA take up. Further, if it could be aligned with local authentication biometrics, that would be wonderful

[rjcorwin]

Hi @ayuishii - I work on the Tangerine project (https://github.com/tangerine-community/tangerine) which is an offline data collection tool used mainly in Africa. The organizations we work with cannot afford additional licensing fees from services such as Microsoft Intune to ensure that device encryption is turned on so we've resorted to handling encryption using SQLcipher. Not only does this tie us to additional infrastructure tools such as Cordova, this also comes with substantial performance impact over using indexDB and potential for App crashes if too large of a query is made. For Tangerine projects and all other software serving markets that cannot afford to manage device settings using subscription services, having encryption in IndexedDb would be a huge win for security and result in more/better software reaching these markets.

[janl]

HI @ayuishii — I’m working on a Covid vaccination project that uses similar technology to Tangerine, and which has strong data-security requirements for personal and medical data. So far, we’re encrypting data before storing it and that works fine, but it’s a hand-rolled encryption mechanism that we’d happily replace for a platform-provided one.

[fierysunset]

Hello @ayuishii! I'll also add a use case :)
We have a messaging web product that is persisting data in IndexedDB to allow for quicker boot up times of the app, draft messages being available across sessions, and better consistency of the state of the app overall. As expected, messaging can contain sensitive and private data, thus the need for encryption.

Would love if this is something that can be a default feature of IndexedDB! Are there any relevant updates?

[evanstade]

To all the requesters of this feature: where is the encryption key to be stored? Is it provided by the app? If it's part of the offline portion of an app, then I suspect this would only create security through obscurity, as the app data itself is not encrypted against other malicious code running on the user's machine. If it's stored on a server only, then the data ceases to be available offline.

[MrAntix]

For me they key would be stored on the authenticator.

for example using the hmac extension in CTAP 2.1

https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.1-rd-20210309/fido-client-to-authenticator-protocol-v2.1-rd-20210309.html#sctn-hmac-secret-extension