What is zero-knowledge encryption?

When an app says it is "encrypted," that can mean very different things. Most cloud services encrypt your data in transit and on their disks, but they hold the keys — which means they can decrypt and read your content whenever they need to. Zero-knowledge encryption is a stronger promise: the service is designed so that it never has the keys, and therefore literally cannot read what you store.

The way this works is that your encryption key is derived from a secret only you know — your passphrase — on your own device. Your notes are encrypted locally before anything is sent anywhere, so what reaches the server is ciphertext: an unreadable blob. The server can store it and hand it back to you, but without your key it has no way to turn that blob back into your words.

This has a real and sometimes uncomfortable consequence: because the service cannot read your data, it also cannot recover it for you if you lose your passphrase. There is no "reset password and see my notes" path, because that path would require the server to have had your key all along. That tradeoff is the whole point — privacy that depends on a promise can be broken, but privacy enforced by math cannot be quietly revoked.

OriginText is built this way. Notes live on your device first and are encrypted at rest. If you turn on sync, the encryption and decryption happen on your devices, and only ciphertext crosses the network — our servers never see your keys or your plaintext. To protect against a lost passphrase, OriginText gives you a one-time recovery code when you set up encryption; keep it somewhere safe, because it is the only other way back into your own data.

The short version: zero-knowledge encryption moves trust off of promises and onto cryptography. You do not have to take our word that we will not read your notes — the system is built so that we cannot. That is the standard we think private notes deserve.