Recently I thought about privacy in the cloud and came to the conclusion, that it’s time to do something about it and use some kind of client-side encryption.

There are quite a few solutions out there, but none of them satisfied my needs. Let me tell you why:

All of these solutions are proprietary. Seriously: If I want to ensure the privacy of my data, then why do I have to sign up with a service, that stores the authentication data for me? Even if the encryption itself may be done on client-side, the security concept is NOT client-side. Why should I trust these proprietary services? Well I just have to. But control is better than trust.

So lets do some more intense research:

Nice client-side approach. But I need a multiplatform solution and still I have my trust-problem. The security can’t be proven. To this problem there is only one solution: Open Source.

For anyone, who cares about privacy, should use this. But for some reason not everybody is using it. So what is the reason? Ease of use. Thats why I started a new open source project aiming to create a consumer-friendly solution (like BoxCryptor or SafeMonk), but with all the security features, that I talked about:

And today I’m proud to release the first public version of my source code on github: github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator

Its a Java project using JavaFX 2 user interfaces. That means that you need Java 7 with jfxrt.jar enabled or Java 8. As soon as Oracle releases the final version of Java 8 (about 2 months from now), I will provide precompiled consumer-friendly .exes, .dmgs, .rpms, .debs, … for your OS of choice. Until then I would like to encourage developers to help me finalize this project. There are still a few small things that need to be done.