LElewisl9029·Dec 7, 2015
This is fascinating. Awesome work!
An encrypted server-side database with client-side decryption definitely seems like a great building block for private, secure applications! However, my ideal building block for the data-layer would take one step further: by only storing data on the client, and be able to synchronize between separate clients in a fully distributed manner.
This would open up the door to purely client-side applications with zero-knowledge sync clients that can be optionally hosted on servers to improve availability without any compromises to privacy. It also has the potential to offer better-than-centralized UX due to the fact that all data is available locally, so there is no network roundtrip to be concerned with. A centralized solution like ZeroDB definitely still has it's place though, especially in applications that i
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nvolve sharing and collaboration between multiple users, and in applications where the size of each user's dataset is too large to be managed fully locally.
My previous project, Toc Messenger [1], used a custom encryption layer over remoteStorage [2] to achieve something close to this, but remoteStorage is not a fully distributed protocol, and has to rely on the existence of a centralized storage server to function. For my next project, I'm hoping to experiment with something like Swarm [3] for the data layer instead, which uses CRDTs for conflict resolution and supposedly supports direct P2P sync in the upcoming 1.0 release [4].
[1] http://toc.im/
[2] http://remotestorage.io/
[3] https://github.com/gritzko/swarm
[4] http://swarmjs.github.io/articles/2of5/