E2E-Encryption for Roam Research - Part 3

Roam Research recently added a significant new feature, end-to-end encryption for the content blocks and the uploaded media. In this article, we take a look into how encryption affects performance.

Hej,

And welcome to this series of articles about a recent feature Roam Research has released this weekend: end-to-end encryption. I have already explored why encryption is so important and how it works, how secure it is (as far as I can judge at the moment), how you encrypt your graph and how you verify that the encryption is working. This article analyzes whether encryption impacts performance and if it does by how much.

You can follow my analysis by watching the linked videos below.

The Video challenge

Uploading

I’ve tested the encryption impact on media files with an mp4 movie.

Encrypting the 83,9 MB video took 13,3 seconds on the encrypted graph.

Uploading the video took 24,4 seconds on the unencrypted graph and 24,5 seconds on the encrypted, which is pretty much expected given that the file size won’t change much.

We have an expected overhead for encrypting big files that should scale almost linear for the file size (0,16 seconds per MB). You will probably not often upload files with …