Aside from being able to take notes and clip them from the web, Evernote is also remarkably adept at keeping them secure from prying eyes. For the security conscious, Evernote offers the security. Evernote uses industry standard encryption to protect your data in transit. This is commonly referred to as transport layer security (“TLS”) or secure socket layer (“SSL”) technology. In addition, we support HTTP Strict Transport Security (“HSTS”) for the Evernote service (www.evernote.com).
Introduction
Evernote users trust us with billions of their notes, projects, and ideas. That trust is based upon us keeping that data both private and secure. The information on this page is intended to provide transparency about how we protect that data. We will continue to expand and update this information as we add new security capabilities and make security improvements to our products.
Security Program
Security is a dedicated team within Evernote. Our security team's charter is protecting the data you store in our service. We drive a security program that includes the following focus areas: product security, infrastructure controls (physical and logical), policies, employee awareness, intrusion detection, and assessment activities.
The security team runs an in-house Incident Response (“IR”) program and provides guidance to Evernote employees on how to report suspicious activity. Our IR team has procedures and tools in place to respond to security issues and continues to evaluate new technologies to improve our ability to detect attacks against our infrastructure, service, and employees.
We periodically assess our infrastructure and applications for vulnerabilities and remediate those that could impact the security of customer data. Our security team continually evaluates new tools to increase the coverage and depth of these assessments.
Network Security
Evernote defines its network boundaries using a combination of load balancers, firewalls, and VPNs. We use these to control which services we expose to the Internet and to segment our production network from the rest of our computing infrastructure. We limit who has access to our production infrastructure based on business need and strongly authenticate that access.
Account Security
Evernote never stores your password in plaintext. When we need to securely store your account password to authenticate you, we use PBKDF2 (Password Based Key Derivation Function 2) with a unique salt for each credential. We select the number of hashing iterations in a way that strikes a balance between user experience and password cracking complexity.
While we don’t require you to set a complex password, our password strength meter will encourage you to choose a strong one. We limit failed login attempts on both a per-account and per-IP-address basis to slow down password guessing attacks.
Evernote offers two-step verification (“2SV”), also known as two-factor or multi-factor authentication, for all accounts. Our 2SV mechanism is based on a time-based one-time password algorithm (TOTP). All users can generate codes locally using an application on their mobile device or can choose to have the codes delivered as a text message.
Email Security
Evernote gives you a way to create notes in your account by sending emails to a unique Evernote email address. To protect you from malicious content, we scan all email we receive using a commercial anti-virus scanning engine.
When you receive an email from Evernote, we want you to be confident that it really came from us. We publish an enforcing DMARC policy to improve your confidence that email you receive from Evernote is legitimate. Every email we send from the following domains will be cryptographically signed using DKIM and originate from an IP address we publish in our SPF record.
Evernote:
- @evernote.com
- @emails.evernote.com
- @comms.evernote.com
- @discussion-notification.evernote.com
- @mail-svc.evernote.com
- @account.evernote.com
- @notifications.evernote.com
- @messages.evernote.com
Product Security
Securing our Internet-facing web service is critically important to protecting your data. Our security team drives an application security program to improve code security hygiene and periodically assess our service for common application security issues including: CSRF, injection attacks (XSS, SQLi), session management, URL redirection, and clickjacking.
Our web service authenticates all third party client applications using OAuth. OAuth provides a seamless way for you to connect a third party application to your account without needing to give the application your login credentials. Once you authenticate to Evernote successfully, we return an authentication token to the client to authenticate your access from that point forward. This eliminates the need for a third party application to ever store your username and password on your device.
Every client application that talks to our service uses a well-defined thrift API for all actions. By brokering all communications through this API, we’re able to establish authorization checks as a foundational construct in the application architecture. There is no direct object access within the service and each client’s authentication token is checked upon each access to the service to ensure the client is authenticated and authorized to access a particular note or notebook. Please see dev.evernote.com for more information.
Customer Segregation
The Evernote service is multi-tenant and does not segment your data from other users’ data. Your data may live on the same servers as another user’s data. We consider your data private and do not permit another user to access it unless you explicitly share it.
Data Retention and Deletion
Evernote retains your content unless you take explicit steps to delete notes and/or notebooks. For information on how to delete notes, please see this help center article. For information on our retention policies, please refer to the section of our privacy policy, titled “Information Deletion”.
Media Disposal and Destruction
We securely erase or destroy all storage media if it has ever been used to store user data. We follow NIST’s guidance in special publication 800-88 to accomplish this. For an example of how we securely destroy broken hard drives, please check out this blog article.
We utilize a variety of storage options in Google’s Cloud Platform (“GCP”), including local disks, persistent disks, and Google Cloud Storage buckets. We take advantage of Google’s cryptographic erasure processes to ensure that repurposing storage does not result in exposing private customer data.
Activity Logging
The Evernote service performs server-side logging of client interactions with our services. This includes web server access logging, as well as activity logging for actions taken through our API. We also collect event data from our client applications. You can view the recent access times and IP addresses for each application connected to your account in the Access History section of your Account Settings.
Transport Encryption
Evernote uses industry standard encryption to protect your data in transit. This is commonly referred to as transport layer security (“TLS”) or secure socket layer (“SSL”) technology. In addition, we support HTTP Strict Transport Security (“HSTS”) for the Evernote service (www.evernote.com). We support a mix of cipher suites and TLS protocols to provide a balance of strong encryption for browsers and clients that support it and backward compatibility for legacy clients that need it. We plan to continue improving our transport security posture to support our commitment to protecting your data.
We support STARTTLS for both inbound and outbound email. If your mail service provider supports TLS, your email will be encrypted in transit, both to and from the Evernote service.
We protect all customer data flowing between our data center and the Google Cloud Platform using IPSEC with GCM-AES-128 encryption or TLS.
Encryption at Rest
In late 2016, we began migrating the Evernote service to the Google Cloud Platform (“GCP”). Customer data that we store in GCP will be protected using Google’s built-in encryption-at-rest features. More technically, we use Google's server-side encryption feature with Google-managed encryption keys to encrypt all data at rest using AES-256, transparently and automatically. You can find additional information on how encryption at rest protects your data here.
Resiliency / Availability
We operate a fault tolerant architecture to ensure that Evernote is there when you need it.
In our both our physical data centers and our cloud infrastructure, this includes:
- Diverse and redundant Internet connections
- Redundant network infrastructure including switches, routers, and firewalls
- Redundant application load balancers
- Redundant servers and virtual instances
- Redundant underlying storage
Both Google and our colocation vendor provide fault tolerant facility services including: power, HVAC, and fire suppression.
We provide live and historical status updates on our service availability here: https://twitter.com/evernotestatus and http://status.evernote.com.
We back up all customer content at least once daily. We do not utilize portable or removable media for backups.
Physical Security
We operate the Evernote service using a combination of cloud services and physical data centers.
For our data centers, we secure our infrastructure in a private, locked cage that includes 24x7x365 monitoring. Access to these data centers requires at a minimum, two-factors of authentication, but may include biometrics as a third factor. Each of our data centers has undergone a SOC-1 Type 2 audit, attesting to their ability to physically secure our infrastructure. Only Evernote operations personnel and data center staff have physical access to this infrastructure and our operations team is alerted each time someone accesses our cage, including a video record of the event.
For our cloud services, we use the Google Cloud Platform. Google has undergone multiple certifications that attest to its ability to physically secure Evernote’s data. You can read more about Google Cloud Platform’s security here.
All Evernote data resides inside the United States.
Privacy and Compliance
Please see our privacy center for more information. We do not publish a Service Organization Control (“SOC”) report.
Updated: April 2017 - What’s new >>
There are several important security steps that you can take to better secure your Evernote data:
Passwords
Use a different password on Evernote than any other site you log into. That way, if someone learns your password on another site, you won’t have to worry about them also being able to access your Evernote account.
Avoid using simple passwords that could be looked up in a dictionary. Instead, choose a complex password that is at least 8 characters long and contains a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Equally good is picking a phrase that is at least 20 characters long.
A password manager can make both of these easy to do. We suggest using one.
Set Up Two-Step Verification (2SV)
Enable two-step verification on your Evernote account to better secure it in the event that someone learns your password.
Two-step verification, also known as two-factor or multi-factor authentication, adds an additional layer of security to the login process, requiring you to enter a special code from your phone, in addition to your regular username and password. The goal of this extra step is to combine something you know (your password) with something only you would have access to (your phone).
Setting up two-step verification is straightforward. Just follow the steps in the Security section of Evernote Web. All users can generate codes locally using an application on their mobile device (we recommend Google Authenticator) or can choose to have the codes delivered as a text message via Telesign.
Evernote Lock Note
One very important thing to note. As part of the setup process, you will be given several one-time codes to use in the event that you are unable to access your phone. Don’t store these codes in Evernote since you’ll need them when you don’t have access to your Evernote account.
Authorized Applications and Access History
You can review, and optionally revoke Evernote applications and other services that have access to your account in the Applications section of Evernote Web, which is located in the Account Settings. Alternatively, when you reset your Evernote password in Evernote Web, you can Revoke all applications as part of the password reset workflow. If you revoke all applications, any attackers with access to your account will lose their access.
You can review the IP addresses and the names of devices and applications that have recently accessed your account, in the Access History section of Evernote Web. The locations of devices or applications listed are not 100% exact (we use Maxmind GeoIP for this feature). Mobile devices and VPN tunnels, in particular, may route through private networks to internet IP addresses located in different geographic locations not anywhere near the original location of the originating device.
End- to-End Encryption
If you are using an Evernote desktop client, such as Windows Desktop and Evernote for Mac, you can encrypt any text inside a note using a passphrase to add an extra level of protection to private information. This end-to-end encryption feature only lets someone that knows the passphrase decrypt the text. We never receive a copy of your passphrase or the encryption key we derive from it. If you forget your passphrase, we cannot recover your data.
When you use this feature, we encrypt your text using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128 bit key. We derive this key from your passphrase using a unique salt and PBKDF2 with 50,000 rounds of SHA-256. We use this key, along with an initialization vector, to encrypt your data in CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode.
Lost or Stolen Devices
If a thief steals a device you have Evernote installed on, they will be able to access your Evernote data as easily as your email, photos, and other applications on that device. To protect yourself against this situation, you should enable the security controls available to you in your device's operating system. These include setting a screen or passcode lock, screensaver or auto-lock timeout, and encrypting your device’s storage.
In most cases, you only need to log into Evernote on your phone, tablet and desktop computer once. If you lose one of these devices, you should revoke its access to your account. Follow these instructions.
How to Verify an Email is From Evernote
Hackers might try to lure you to log into a site that looks like Evernote, but isn’t really Evernote. We call this password-stealing attack “phishing.” Before entering your Evernote username and password into a site, be sure to verify that the URL in your browser starts with https://www.evernote.com/ or https://evernote.com.
Every email that Evernote sends is cryptographically signed and sent from IP addresses we publish. If you receive an email from one of these domains, you can trust it.
Evernote:
- @evernote.com
- @emails.evernote.com
- @comms.evernote.com
- @discussion-notification.evernote.com
- @mail-svc.evernote.com
- @account.evernote.com
- @notifications.evernote.com
- @messages.evernote.com
If you receive an email that looks like it is from Evernote, but the sender address is not one of those domains, we did not send it and you should delete it.
Evernote Password Lock
For more information on spam and malware email claiming to be from Evernote, please see this help & learning article.
Malware Protection
A common way for you to get malware on your computer is by visiting a site that tries to exploit a security vulnerability in your browser or the browser plugins you have installed. This is called a “drive-by download.” A great way to protect yourself is to prevent web browser plugins from automatically running. Follow the steps for your browser:
Firefox: configure your plugins to “Ask to Activate”. See this page for details on how to do this for Adobe Flash.
Evernote Lock Notes From Editing
Chrome: make sure you are running the latest version and you will be prompted when a site wants to run a plugin.
Evernote Lock Notebook
You should only run plugins when necessary, for example downloading a financial statement, and only if you trust the website.
Evernote Locked Me Out
You should also keep your software up to date. When an application alerts you that an update is available, install it right away. Be cautious of updates that appear in a web browser as many of these are fake and will try to trick you into installing malware.