E2EE for shared notes on Joplin Cloud: what does it look like?

[candrak]

I've been waiting for Joplin Cloud to share notes with E2EE. And it now looks to me like E2EE is now possible for shared notes on Cloud.

Firstly, prerequisites. Note sharing needs a Pro Plan at minimum to share. Then, to collaborate on a shared notebook, you'll need a Pro Plan. So, a Pro Plan needs to be had by all parties to be involved in a shared notebook.

Now, on to encryption. At first, shared notes didn't have E2EE. I've sorted my findings by timeline, assuming that newer information likely supersedes old information.

2021.07.27: "If you share the note, E2EE no longer applies to that note."

• "I'm planning to add support for E2EE for shared notes and notebooks, but first I need to improve how E2EE works (started here)"

2021.08.09: "any shared notebook or note will not be encrypted"

2021.08.12: possible dependency for enabling E2EE on shared notes is merged.

2021.01.01: found that translation file for JP has a string that suggests E2EE is enabled for shared notebooks.

2022.01.01: E2EE specification mentions Public-private key pairs, which reads like they enable E2EE on shared notes.

• "At this point, both users have a copy of the key and can share notes over E2EE."

I hope this now means that even shared notes on Joplin now benefit from E2EE

[CalebJohn]

You're right, it's been possible since version 2.6! You can see it in the announcement, about the 3rd item down

Joplin 2.6 is available!

Many changes in this new release, available on mobile, desktop and CLI: Per-notebook sort order and sort buttons This new feature adds a number of changes to the way notes are sorted. The most visible one is the addition of a sort button above the note list - it allows sorting by modification date, creation date, title or by custom order, in either ascending or descending order: [e01faef5e3e24f6ebf2c2329b41afd68] By default, this sort order is going to apply to all notebooks, however you can…

[candrak]

Brilliant! Thank you for linking to an explicit first-party announcement.

I missed that one.

Lesson here for me is to not, in future, assume the feature for which I'm waiting will headline the changelogs

[maritime]

In the Shared Notes section in Joplin Help, it says:

It is possible to use the share notebook feature even with E2EE enabled, however any shared notebook or note will not be encrypted, otherwise you would have had to give your master key password to the people you share with, which you'd probably not want to do.

Is the above correct, or is it old information?

[candrak]

@maritime The announcement linked above suggests that you are correct, the Shared Notes section in Joplin Help is outdated.

The announcement doesn't explicitly mention end-to-end encryption for shared notes, only that collaborating on encrypted notebooks is now possible.