Timeline for database encryption support?

MMEX4Android 5.1 and above upon SAF

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Stabskapitaen
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Timeline for database encryption support?

Post by Stabskapitaen »

I don't mean to bother the development team of this great project,
but is there any estimated timeline when MMEX for Android will support
database encryption?

Many thanks and best regards

Frank 
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MisterY
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Re: Timeline for database encryption support?

Post by MisterY »

Hi, Frank,

No, unfortunately there are no timelines in the project in general. This is a hobby project, implemented in what spare time we have so it is difficult to create estimates and even more so to commit to them.
There is currently only one person maintaining the Android port and unfortunately there are plenty of other activities besides programming that need to be taken care of and that are now taking the majority of time.

However, being an Open Source project, anyone is welcome to contribute their time and effort and implement the features they would like to see inside the app. After all, that's how the other developers in the project started.

Coming back to this specific feature, I have tried a couple of times to complete the implementation using a very popular (and probably the only reliable) SQLite encryption library - SQLCipher. While implementing the library worked, there were many accompanying consequences like errors in multi-threaded read/write, and just different behaviour of the database engine. This library is practically a custom build of SQLite and always lags the version that comes with later versions of Android. So, in the end, the end result was unusable.
There are pros and cons for both approaches.

Another point is that, while I understand the need for the safe storage and transport of data, I would prefer us to concentrate the efforts on providing the features of a personal finance application rather than all the accompanying infrastructure. There are plenty of applications, technologies, and services that provide this support. For example, encryption is now supported directly in Android where a user can encrypt the whole storage partition (SD Card, for example). The same can be done on a PC by using TrueCrypt, etc.
Safe backup and transfer can be done by using Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. All these services support SSL and have accompanying apps that handle the file transfer and synchronization.

Don't get me wrong. Nobody oposes implementing these features but the limited resources dictate the priorities in the list of (currently) 124 open issues for the mobile app.
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