Nextcloud end-to-end encryption offers the ultimate protection for your data, making it suitable for your most private information. Use it to protect a copy of your passport, passwords, driver’s license or bank account information.

Enterprises could require employees to keep a subset of the most confidential information client-side encrypted. Research, customer information or strategic documents can be guaranteed to be kept confidential.

Seamless integration and ease of use with key features like offline recovery keys, auditing and HSM support make Nextcloud End-to-end Encryption the perfect complement to other Nextcloud security features including Server-side Encryption and File Access Control.

Cryptographic Identity Protection

Every user gets a unique public/private key combination when they first enable end-to-end encryption. The public key is sent to the server and signed into a certificate. The certificate is checked by the users’ other clients and used by other users to share encrypted files with the first user, based on Trust On First Use.

• Each device of the user can aid in recovering their private key. Only if a key is lost on all devices AND the 12 secure key words are lost, the user loses access to his/her data. The optional offline administrator recovery key can still be used to re-gain access.
• By default, keys can’t change so as to protect the identity of users from hacking if the server is compromised. If the key could change, a hacker could issue a ‘new’ certificate for the user and have clients respond by re-encrypting data with the new, compromised key.
• The process enables a complete audit log, crucial for enterprise use.
• The certificate can optionally be issued by a Hardware Security Module so it is possible to issue new certificates for existing users in a secure way.

Use cases

Users can access data on a FTP drive shared with another company; while data stored on an external S3 compatible object storage could be encrypted using server-side encryption so the storage provider has no way to compromise their security.

And with the Nextcloud File Access Control feature, files from the HR department can always be enforced to be end-to-end encrypted on their clients, protecting their data from even the worst case of a full server breach. Similarly, sensitive research, customer information or strategic documents can be guaranteed to be kept even from server administrators.

Enabling encryption

The encryption is based upon an asymmetric cryptographic system. Every user has exactly one private and public key pair.

The key generation process is designed to keep the contents of the private key from the server while storing it security so it can be synced to other devices the user owns. Some other properties of the process:

The user creates an identity which is signed by the server (using a certificate) and associated with their public key. Users can only have one identity, other clients will refuse to accept a new certificate following the Trust on First Use (TOFU) model. This protects data from a malicious server which tries to generate a new identity for a target user and get clients to re-encrypt the data against it.

In case a user loses their device they can easily recover by using the mnemonic passphrase. The mnemonic passphrase can also be shown in the client settings in case the user forgets their mnemonic. Displaying the mnemonic requires the user to enter their PIN/fingerprint again on mobile devices.

Sharing on folder-level granularity must be possible to individual users. No passwords should need to be exchanged for sharing. Key exchange should be auditable. Adding devices should be easy and new devices should have access to all previously encrypted data.

The protocol needs to support versioning in case of future changes to metadata or crypto handling. Design should support a hardware security module, giving strong authentication, tamper-resistance and a complete audit trail.