Reading view

End to end encrypted post meta for WordPress, gated by a policy the site itself can't override. Looking for feedback on scope.

I'm a dev at Tide and I've been building out a WordPress plugin in my spare cycles. Before I sink some more time into it I'd rather find out whether I'm solving a problem anyone actually has, so I'm posting the plan here while it's still cheap to change.

Quick context on Tide if you haven't run into it: it's threshold cryptography, meaning keys get split across a decentralised network of nodes (we call them ORKs) so no single party, including us, ever holds a whole key.

What the plugin does right now: you pick which post meta keys are sensitive, and those get encrypted and decrypted in the browser. WordPress never sees the plaintext. Neither does MySQL, your host, your backups, or the 23 other plugins you've got installed. Whether a given user is allowed to decrypt is decided by a Tide policy enforced across the ORK network, so it isn't a current_user_can() check sitting in PHP that an attacker can just walk around once they've got admin.

The honest downsides, because I'd rather you hear them from me:

  • You can't search, sort or filter on encrypted meta. meta_query on those keys is dead.
  • WP-CLI and any REST consumer that isn't going through the browser path sees ciphertext and nothing else.

So my actual question. Post meta felt like the natural first target because it's where custom fields and ACF and half the plugin ecosystem park their data, but I'm not convinced it's what people are losing sleep over. Would you rather see this applied to:

  • form submissions (CF7, Gravity, WPForms entries sitting in the DB in plaintext forever)
  • WooCommerce customer and order fields
  • private uploads and media
  • user profile fields
  • membership or CRM style plugin data
  • something I haven't listed

It'll be open source, and there's a free tier so you can run it without talking to anyone in sales first.

Two things I'd genuinely like answers to: what data on your sites do you wish WordPress simply never held in readable form, and what would stop you installing something like this even if it were free?

Happy to go into the crypto in the comments if anyone cares about that part.

submitted by /u/Jealous_Pea_3915
[link] [comments]
  •  
❌