Endless reports on data leaks reaffirm how important it is for developers to secure data and guarantee users privacy. Gemalto estimates, that since 2013 over 9 billion records have been lost, stolen or compromised. A trend which is, even more worryingly, increasing extremely rapidly with a 164% year-to-year increase.

End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) ensures that only intended users can access private data: All the exchanged information is encrypted and decrypted directly on users devices and never leaves them in plain. Thus, the E2EE data stored on servers (cloud servers, in particular) is not accessible to unauthorized third parties: hackers, server admins, governments and institutions, service providers, etc. E2EE reduces the risk of attacks: Why would anyone steal data that is encrypted and, therefore, cannot be read?

E2EE is still not universally used, since implementing E2EE is hard. It is notoriously difficult to carry out all the necessary cryptographic schemes without introducing flaws that reduce the security of the application to nothing. A recent study by Veracode showed that more than a half of applications are affected by cryptographic issues. The complexity of E2EE implementation also rises abruptly with the number of features: Users don’t only want to store static information, but they also desire to share it with other users (e.g. Snapchat messaging) or groups of users (e.g. Slack); and developers need to compute statistics directly on the encrypted data.

DataPeps is a cloud-based solution that encourages the use of E2EE by simplifying its integration into your applications. By using the open source DataPeps SDK, you can easily encrypt users private data from end to end, as well as share and audit it — in short, treat the sensitive information with care and respect.

This technical tutorial will show you how to use DataPeps to add E2EE to a simple note keeper application MyPrivateNote.

Tour of MyPrivateNote

Our sample app MyPrivateNote allows to create and delete notes. In addition, users can download notes and import them back.