How onBookmarks Protects Your Data

Bookmarks are more personal than most people think. Your saved links describe your health questions, your finances, your job search, the project you haven't announced yet. That's why privacy isn't a settings toggle for us — it's architecture.

This post explains, in plain language, exactly how onBookmarks protects your data. No vague "bank-level security" hand-waving — here's what actually happens.

Encryption happens on your device, not our servers

When you mark a bookmark as encrypted, the encryption runs in your browser, before anything is sent to us. The URL, title, description, and notes are encrypted with AES-GCM, the same authenticated encryption standard used by modern messaging apps.

What reaches our servers is ciphertext. We can't read it, our database administrator can't read it, and if someone ever stole our database, they couldn't read it either.

Your password never leaves your device

Encrypted bookmarks are locked with a password only you know. We turn that password into an encryption key using PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 600,000 iterations — the iteration count recommended by OWASP — and a random salt generated for every single bookmark.

Two things follow from this design:

• We cannot recover your encrypted bookmarks if you forget your password. That's not a support limitation — it's the proof that we genuinely can't read your data.
• Identical bookmarks encrypt to different ciphertext. Per-bookmark salts mean nobody can tell that two users (or two entries) saved the same link.

Encryption is selective — you choose what's sensitive

Not everything needs to be encrypted, and encrypting everything would break useful features like full-text search and AI tagging. So encryption in onBookmarks is per-bookmark: keep your recipe collection searchable and shareable, encrypt the bookmarks that are nobody's business.

Encrypted data stays out of every side channel

A zero-knowledge design only matters if it's consistent. We've audited the paths where data could accidentally leak, and closed them:

• Public collections never include encrypted bookmarks. If you share a collection publicly, encrypted entries are excluded at the database query level — ciphertext never appears on an indexable page.
• Exports don't dump ciphertext. When you export your library, encrypted bookmarks are represented as locked placeholders instead of unusable (or worse, decryptable-offline) blobs.
• Our browser extension never handles your keys. It saves new bookmarks and displays encrypted ones as masked entries — decryption only ever happens in the app, on your device.

Honest about the boundaries

Security pages usually stop at the marketing. Here's the part most services leave out:

• Non-encrypted bookmarks are stored conventionally so that search, AI tagging, archiving, and sharing work. Encryption is the tool for the subset you decide is sensitive.
• We use versioned ciphertext formats. When we hardened our key derivation (moving to 600k-iteration PBKDF2 with per-bookmark salts), existing bookmarks kept working and upgrade automatically the next time you save them — no forced migration, no data loss.
• If you find something we got wrong, tell us. Security reports go to the top of the queue.

The bigger picture

Our position is simple: you shouldn't have to choose between a smart bookmark manager and a private one. Cloud convenience — sync, search, AI organization — with self-hosting-grade privacy for the things that matter.

Read the full technical details on our Security page, or try it yourself:

Ready to try it?

Create a free account and encrypt your first bookmark in under a minute. Your keys stay yours.