Privacy and Security

jrnl is designed with privacy and security in mind, but like any other program there are some limitations to be aware of.

Password strength

jrnl doesn't enforce password strength requirements. Short or commonly-used passwords can be easily circumvented by someone with basic security skills to access to your encrypted jrnl file.

Plausible deniability

You may be able to hide the contents of your journal behind a layer of encryption, but if someone has access to your configuration file, then they can figure out that you have a journal, where that journal file is, and when you last edited it. With a sufficient power imbalance, someone may be able to force you to unencrypt it through non-technical means.

Spying

While jrnl can protect against unauthorized access to your journal entries while it isn't open, it cannot protect you against an unsafe computer/location. For example:

• Someone installs a keylogger, tracking what you type into your journal.
• Someone watches your screen while you write your entry.
• Someone installs a backdoor into jrnl or poisons your journal into revealing your entries.

Saved Passwords

When creating an encrypted journal, you'll be prompted as to whether or not you want to "store the password in your keychain." This keychain is accessed using the Python keyring library, which has different behavior depending on your operating system.

In Windows, the keychain is the Windows Credential Manager (WCM), which can't be locked and can be accessed by any other application running under your username. If this is a concern for you, you may not want to store your password.

Shell history

Since you can enter entries from the command line, any tool that logs command line actions is a potential security risk. See below for how to deal with this problem in various shells.

bash

You can disable history logging for jrnl by adding this line into your ~/.bashrc file:

HISTIGNORE="$HISTIGNORE:jrnl *"

To delete existing jrnl commands from bash history, simply delete them from your bash history file. The default location of this file is ~/.bash_history, but you can run echo "$HISTFILE" to find it if needed. Also, you can run history -c to delete all commands from your history.

zsh

You can disable history logging for jrnl by adding this to your ~/.zshrc file:

setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
alias jrnl=" jrnl"

To delete existing jrnl commands from zsh history, simply remove them from your zsh history file. The default location of this file is ~/.zsh_history, but you can run echo "$HISTFILE" to find it if needed. Also, you can run history -c to delete all commands from your history.

fish

By default fish will not log any command that starts with a space. If you want to always run jrnl with a space before it, then you can add this to your ~/.config/fish/config.fish file:

abbr --add jrnl " jrnl"

To delete existing jrnl commands from fish history, run history delete --prefix 'jrnl '.

Windows Command Prompt

Windows doesn't log history to disk, but it does keep it in your command prompt session. Close the command prompt or press Alt+F7 to clear your history after journaling.

Files in transit from editor to jrnl

When creating or editing an entry, jrnl uses a unencrypted temporary file on disk in order to give your editor access to your journal. After you close your editor, jrnl then deletes this temporary file.

So, if you have saved a journal entry but haven't closed your editor yet, the unencrypted temporary remains on your disk. If your computer were to shut off during this time, or the jrnl process were killed unexpectedly, then the unencrypted temporary file will remain on your disk. You can mitigate this issue by only saving with your editor right before closing it. You can also manually delete these files from your temporary folder. By default, they are named jrnl*.jrnl, but if you use a template, they will have the same extension as the template.

Editor history

Some editors keep usage history stored on disk for future use. This can be a security risk in the sense that sensitive information can leak via recent search patterns or editor commands.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code stores the contents of saved files to allow you to restore or review the contents later. You can disable this feature for all files by unchecking the workbench.localHistory.enabled setting in the Settings editor.

Alternatively, you can disable this feature for specific files by configuring a pattern in the workbench.localHistory.exclude setting. To exclude unencrypted temporary files generated by jrnl, you can set the **/jrnl*.jrnl (unless you are using a template) pattern for the workbench.localHistory.exclude setting in the Settings editor.

Visual Studio Code also creates a copy of all unsaved files that are open. It stores these copies in a backup location that's automatically cleaned when you save the file. However, if your computer shuts off before you save the file, or the Visual Studio Code process stops unexpectedly, then an unencrypted temporary file may remain on your disk. You can manually delete these files from the backup location.

Vim

Vim stores progress data in a so called Viminfo file located at ~/.viminfo which contains all sorts of user data including command line history, search string history, search/substitute patterns, contents of register etc. Also to be able to recover opened files after an unexpected application close Vim uses swap files.

These options as well as other leaky features can be disabled by setting the editor key in the Jrnl settings like this:

editor: "vim -c 'set viminfo= noswapfile noundofile nobackup nowritebackup noshelltemp history=0 nomodeline secure'"

To disable all plugins and custom configurations and start Vim with the default configuration -u NONE can be passed on the command line as well. This will ensure that any rogue plugins or other difficult to catch information leaks are eliminated. The downside to this is that the editor experience will decrease quite a bit.

To instead let Vim automatically detect when a Jrnl file is being edited an autocommand can be used. Place this in your ~/.vimrc:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPre *.jrnl setlocal viminfo= noswapfile noundofile nobackup nowritebackup noshelltemp history=0 nomodeline secure

See :h <option> in Vim for more information about the options mentioned.

Neovim

Neovim strives to be mostly compatible with Vim and has therefore similar functionality as Vim. One difference in Neovim is that the Viminfo file is instead called the ShaDa ("shared data") file which resides in ~/.local/state/nvim (~/.local/share/nvim pre Neovim v0.8.0). The ShaDa file can be disabled in the same way as for Vim.

editor: "nvim -c 'set shada= noswapfile noundofile nobackup nowritebackup noshelltemp history=0 nomodeline secure'"

-u NONE can be passed here as well to start a session with the default configs.

As for Vim above we can create an autocommand in Vimscript:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufReadPre *.jrnl setlocal shada= noswapfile noundofile nobackup nowritebackup noshelltemp history=0 nomodeline secure

or the same but in Lua:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd( {"BufNewFile","BufReadPre" }, {
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("PrivateJrnl", {}),
  pattern = "*.jrnl",
  callback = function()
    vim.o.shada = ""
    vim.o.swapfile = false
    vim.o.undofile = false
    vim.o.backup = false
    vim.o.writebackup = false
    vim.o.shelltemp = false
    vim.o.history = 0
    vim.o.modeline = false
    vim.o.secure = true
  end,
})

Please see :h <option> in Neovim for more information about the options mentioned.

Notice any other risks?

Please let the maintainers know by filing an issue on GitHub.