Nextcloud E2EE experiences on NC 33.0.2 / E2EE 2.0.2

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Hi,

I would like to start a discussion on real life experiences using end-to-end-encryption with Nextcloud.

There seems very little online information on all this and what there is is outdated and pretty negative.

I recently started my own tests using the most recent NC version 33.0.2 and the also pretty new E2EE app v2.0.2 on the server (a Raspi 4b).

So far my experience is pretty positive:

  • Installation of the server app was done in a minute, single click.
  • Setting up a new encrypted folder also was quick and easy on both windows and iOS clients.
  • Copying files in there also worked as well as renaming them.
  • since encryption is done on client side a relatively weak server such as a Raspi is no limitation
  • Security setup seems pretty good when I look at the code analysis for 2.0.2

Some caveats:

  • as far as I can see means moving things around re-uploading and changing folder names seems also to trigger some rework. That is a non issue if you have a well thought through structure though.
  • my main concern is the speed of uploads. This can be as slow as 1 file per second and it is not limited by compute power on client or server (small files are not a lot faster than large ones). It seems the limitation is on network side as every file triggers a bunch of requests (5 serial HTTP roundtrips) and all this is not optimized for bulk. A proper batch upload API would be great as next feature request
  • be aware that files in an E2EE folder can not be marked as “offline available”
  • be aware that no previews of pictures will show until you have downloaded them
  • my understanding of the code also is that here any changing of the menemonic requires full re-upload as all files then need to be re-encrypted

So my recommendation is that you test it.

I’ll watch it over the next weeks and probably will move from Cryptomator to using this built in feature as I want to get rid of the extra layer (also triggered by the extra Cryptomator compatibility issues of that layer we saw in the recent weeks).