CryptBoard – The tool for sharing encrypted files and text for crypto-serious

CryptBoard – The tool for sharing encrypted files and text for crypto-serious

To all the crypto anarchists reading this, here is a free project that you can host on your own server, which will allow you to do some “craziness”. This tool is called CryptBoard and is nothing less than an encrypted clipboard that allows you to securely copy and paste text and files and share them between different machines.

Designed to allow for excellent anonymity, CryptBoard uses RSA + AES hybrid encryption on the client side. Thus, the client makes an anonymous authorization request to the server, and obtains a random UID from the server, and each message is encrypted in AES with a random 256-bit key.

This random AES key is then encrypted by the user’s RSA public key and sent to the server. Once the recipient receives the message from the server, they decrypt the AES key with their RSA private key, and then decode the AES-encoded message.

Users must share their UID and RSA public key via a link or QR code in order to be able to write and read, but the private key is not shared with the server or other clients.

In addition, the integrity of the public key and UID can be visually verified by inspecting the avatar generated from the hash of the public key and UID.

It may seem a bit complex when described like this (lol) but this approach solves certain problems related to file or text sharing between certain machines and VMs, or machines controlled remotely, without ever compromising on security. And since CryptoBoard comes in the form of a website, there is no need to install a tool to share secrets such as passwords.

If you want more information on encryption, click here. Its code is available on Github, so you can audit or improve it if you wish.

To install it on your machine, you will need to have Docker and follow the following procedure:

First, clone the code like this:

git clone https://github.com/MihanEntalpo/cryptboard.io.git

Install Docker and Docker Compose if not already done. As well as Nginx.

Then create the config file like this:

cp web-app/.env.docker.example web-app/.env.docker

And generate the necessary private and public keys like this:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -m PEM -f jwtRS256.key 
Do not put a passphrase 

openssl rsa -in jwtRS256.key -pubout -outform PEM -out jwtRS256.key.pub

2 files will then be created: jwtRS256.key and jwtRS256.key.pub

Add the contents of these files to the JWT_PUBLIC_KEY and JWT_PRIVATE_KEY variables in the .env.docker file using the following commands:

LINE=$(cat ./web-app/jwtRS256.key | tr '\n' '$' | sed 's|$|\n|g;s|^|JWT_PRIVATE_KEY=|g'); sed -i "s|^JWT_PRIVATE_KEY.|$LINE|g" -i ./web-app/.env.docker LINE=$(cat ./web-app/jwtRS256.key.pub | tr '\n' '$' | sed 's|$|\n|g;s|^|JWT_PUBLIC_KEY=|g'); sed -i "s|^JWT_PUBLIC_KEY.|$LINE|g" -i ./web-app/.env.docker

Set the SERVER_HOST and SERVER_PORT variables in the .env.docker file to point to your Nginx, then create the Docker image like this:

./build-docker-images.sh

And launch the Docker Compose like this:

./docker-compose.sh up -d

Then go to the URL http://127.0.0.1:PORT/ to see if everything is working properly. Next, configure Nginx as a reverse proxy for this local server and enable SSL if necessary using the conf/nginx/docker-proxypass.conf file as a template for your Docker configuration.

Make sure to set the correct hostname, proxy_pass port, location of log files, and LetsEncrypt key and certificate files.

And if you’re feeling lazy to do all of that, you can still use the tool here: https://cryptboard.io