jrnl/docs/encryption.md

Encryption

A Note on Security

While jrnl follows best practices, total security is never possible in the real world. There are a number of ways that people can at least partially compromise your jrnl data. See the Privacy and Security page for more information.

Encrypting and Decrypting

Existing plain text journal files can be encrypted using the --encrypt command:

jrnl --encrypt [FILENAME]

You can then enter a new password, and the unencrypted file will replaced with the new encrypted file.

This command also works to change the password for a journal file that is already encrypted. jrnl will prompt you for the current password and then new password.

Conversely,

jrnl --decrypt [FILENAME]

replaces the encrypted journal file with a plain text file. You can also specify a filename, e.g., jrnl --decrypt plain_text_copy.txt, to leave the original encrypted file untouched and create a new plain text file next to it.

Storing Passwords in Your Keychain

You can't recover or reset your jrnl password. If you lose it, your data will be inaccessible forever.

For this reason, when encrypting a journal, jrnl asks whether you would like to store the password in your system's keychain. An added benefit is that you will not need to enter the password when interacting with the journal file.

If you don't initially store the password in your keychain but decide to do so later---or if you want to store it in one computer's keychain but not in another computer's---you can run jrnl --encrypt on an encrypted journal and use the same password again. This will trigger the keychain storage prompt.

Manual Decryption

The easiest way to decrypt your journal is with jrnl --decrypt, but if you would like to decrypt your journal manually, you can do so with any program that supports the AES algorithm in CBC. The key used for encryption is the SHA-256 hash of your password. The IV (initialization vector) is stored in the first 16 bytes of the encrypted file. The plain text is encoded in UTF-8 and padded according to PKCS#7 before being encrypted.

Here is a Python script that you can use to decrypt your journal:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import base64
import getpass
from pathlib import Path
from cryptography.fernet import Fernet
from cryptography.hazmat.backends import default_backend
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives import hashes
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.kdf.pbkdf2 import PBKDF2HMAC


filepath = input("journal file path: ")
password = getpass.getpass("Password: ")

with open(Path(filepath),"rb") as f:
    ciphertext = f.read()

password = password.encode("utf-8")
kdf = PBKDF2HMAC(
    algorithm=hashes.SHA256(),
    length=32,
    salt=b"\xf2\xd5q\x0e\xc1\x8d.\xde\xdc\x8e6t\x89\x04\xce\xf8",
    iterations=100_000,
    backend=default_backend(),
)

key = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(kdf.derive(password))

print(Fernet(key).decrypt(ciphertext).decode('utf-8'))

To run the above script, you'll need cryptography, which you can install with pip:

pip3 install cryptography

If you're still using jrnl version 1.X, the following script serves the same purpose:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import argparse
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
import getpass
import hashlib
import sys

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("filepath", help="journal file to decrypt")
args = parser.parse_args()

pwd = getpass.getpass()
key = hashlib.sha256(pwd.encode('utf-8')).digest()

with open(args.filepath, 'rb') as f:
    ciphertext = f.read()

crypto = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CBC, ciphertext[:16])
plain = crypto.decrypt(ciphertext[16:])
plain = plain.strip(plain[-1:])
plain = plain.decode("utf-8")
print(plain)

This script requires pycrypto:

pip3 install pycrypto