pouchdb-adapter-crackup

When they crack down, we crack up! 🤡

A PouchDB plugin that adds the crackup adapter, which transparently encrypts and decrypts data while preserving the sort order of document IDs and view keys. As a result document IDs and view keys are unencrypted at rest, while the rest of the database is always encrypted. Regarding replication, documents are decrypted prior to transmission.

This approach is in contrast to that of ComDB, an encryption plugin that maintains an encrypted copy of changes to a database. That approach makes it possible to ensure the entire database is encrypted at rest in exchange for potentially significant resource overhead. The crackup adapter avoids this duplication cost while sacrificing a certain degree of data protection. If leaving document IDs and view keys unencrypted does not meet your encryption requirements, consider using ComDB instead.

The crackup adapter wraps a leveldown constructor in order to apply encryption with encrypt-down, which uses JSON Web Keys to encrypt database entries. Unlike with PouchDB's leveldown-based adapters, you must pass your own leveldown constructor to PouchDB when creating new databases. This means you can pass any leveldown implementation, such as level-js or networked-hyperbeedown.

For example:

const leveldown = require('leveldown')
const PouchDB = require('pouchdb')
PouchDB.plugin(require('pouchdb-adapter-crackup'))

// first, we generate a key to use for encryption. works like a password.
const jwk = await PouchDB.genJWK()
// then we instantiate a database using this adapter and this jwk.
const db = new PouchDB('example', { adapter: 'crackup', db: leveldown, jwk })
// now we can write data to the database...
await db.put({ _id: 'a', hello: 'world' })
// ...and read it back normally!
const doc = await db.get('a')
console.log(doc.hello)
// > "world"

Install

Use npm or whatever.

$ npm i --save pouchdb-adapter-crackup

Usage

After applying crackup as a plugin, you can use it as an adapter. Additionally, it adds a static method to PouchDB, .genJWK(), which you can use to generate the necessary credentials to begin encrypting.

new PouchDB(name, { adapter: 'crackup', db, jwk })

• name: The name of your database. This is passed to your leveldown constructor.
• db: A leveldown constructor.
• jwk: A JSON Web Key. Passed to encrypt-down.

const jwk = await PouchDB.genJWK(alg = 'A256GCM')

• jwk: A JSON web key. Looks like { k: '...', ... }. Don't worry about it.
• alg: The name of an encryption algorithm to use. See RFC-7517 for a full list of available algorithms. Defaults to "A256GCM" aka AES-256-GCM.

Development

This adapter includes a test suite, thank goodness. You can run it by building the project from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/garbados/pouchdb-adapter-crackup
$ cd pouchdb-adapter-crackup
$ npm i
$ npm test

To check test coverage, run npm run cov.

License

Apache-2.0