HN Explorer

Show HN: Whisper.Page – Share secrets, notes, and code with someone you trust (whisper.page)

2 points by ackatz ↗ HN
Whisper.Page (https://whisper.page)

Hi HN,

I made an app to share secrets, notes, and code blocks with someone you trust. Some of the interesting/useful aspects of Whisper Pages are:

* Focused around Markdown * Open source * Client-side decryption with WebAssembly (the key is stored in the window location hash in the URL)

Please check it out and let me know what you think. There are tons and tons of similar apps out there, so this is not exactly revolutionary – but it was fun to try to figure it out.

Some features that I am thinking about for the future: * API * Notification when your Whisper Page has been destroyed * Permanent and/or scheduled Whisper Pages * Destroy after X number of views * Other cool things I can try with WASM

8 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] thread
m348e912
Stupid question: If the decryption key is in the URL (which I assume it is), what's the point of decrypting client side?
ackatz
The whole URL with the decryption key gets sent to the user one time when it’s generated. The key is tacked on at the end after a “#” symbol like you would see in a bookmark. It’s not used by the app as a bookmark, but the value is still accessible in the browser (window.location.hash). This way, I can send users their links and their decryption keys, but I will never be able to access the keys myself.
m348e912
Right, but your server logs should see the full request (and the keys), no?
ackatz
I just see these in my server logs when someone generates a link:

INFO: [cloudflare ip]:47174 - "POST /generate_link HTTP/1.1" 200 OK

m348e912
So you don't also see "GET /e47b07057738525b2f77fab1ef3197cac1b27e7672ea1a49bc5ae4f87eb19e8c/73a3257c89dbef144434269df702364eb0422554c508b6433266b4e65d07b344#p3d3pLH7ND2cr6EJztGmQosfPZdItxE_FQ5zCsGZ5bM=/ HTTP/1.1" 200 OK?

(That would be a test message I created a link for)

ackatz
No, anything including and after the # is not seen by the server. Here is a screenshot from Fly that shows what it looks like from my end: https://imgur.com/a/41XxtHJ

If someone were to go to just the /sha256/sha256 link without the encryption key bookmark appended to it, they would see: Decryption failed: ChaCha20Poly1305 key must be 32 bytes.

Or with a wrong key they would see: Decryption failed:

m348e912
Ah clever, that's the part I was missing. Cool idea and implementation. Thanks!