fidelius

“An immensely complex spell involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find - unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it.”

The goal of fidelius is to provide a simple interface for encrypting and password-protecting your static HTML files, and supporting secure and (optionally) self-contained in-browser authentication and decryption.

This package sits on the shoulders of the cryptography library, sodium, to provide secure methods for encryption, decryption, and password hashing - both by it’s R interface via {sodium} and its JavaScript API for in-browser decryption.

This package drew inspiration from the staticrypt, rmdprotectr, and encryptedRmd projects.

Installation

You can install the released version of fidelius from CRAN with:

install.packages('fidelius')

You can install the development version of fidelius from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("mattwarkentin/fidelius")

If you notice any bugs or would like to request new features, please feel free to file an Issue.

Usage

library(fidelius)

There are two main functions that you will use:

1. charm() - Use this function to render an existing R Markdown or HTML document into a fidelius password-protected HTML document.

2. html_password_protected() - An R Markdown output format that can be used directly in the YAML frontmatter to create password-protected files rendered to other HTML formats.

In both cases, the desired HTML document format is rendered and then securely encrypted using sodium::data_encrypt(), based on the user-provided password and a nonce. The output file is an HTML document that contains the encrypted content, the nonce, and the machinery to perform secure in-browser authentication and decryption. The correct password is required to reveal the hidden content. The output file can be hosted on any static site hosting service (e.g. GitHub Pages) for browser-side password-protection.

By default, the name of the output file is the name of the input file with an HTML extension, but this can be configured using the output argument.

charm()

As its main input, charm() accepts an R Markdown file (that must be rendered to an HTML format) or an existing HTML file.

When calling charm(), you must either supply the password in the function call, like charm("index.Rmd", password = "pw1234!"), or, if password is not supplied, you will be prompted to supply the password in a pop-up (only if the function is invoked in an interactive R session). The password can be any set of characters that can be hashed using the sodium::hash() algorithm.

# To supply the password interactively
charm("index.Rmd")

If an R Markdown file is provided as input, the HTML document produced by rmarkdown::render(input) is saved to a temporary directory that is destroyed when the R session ends.

See Styling and Password Hint for more details on how to style your landing page and how to include a helpful password hint!

html_password_protected()

Use html_password_protected by supplying it as the output in the YAML frontmatter of an R Markdown file.

---
output: fidelius::html_password_protected
---

By default, this will render your content as an rmarkdown::html_document() before encrypting and password protecting the document.

To render to a different format, specify the output_format (you may pass any additional arguments to the desired output_format as you normally would):

---
output:
  fidelius::html_password_protected:
    output_format: 
      rmarkdown::html_document:
        toc: true
---

fidelius is compatible with most existing HTML output formats. See website for examples. At the moment, {bookdown} formats are not supported due to their unique rendering process (this may change in the future).

In both of the above examples, if you try to render the document by using the “Knit” button in RStudio or using rmarkdown::render() in an interactive session, you will be prompted to supply a password. In a non-interactive session, the rendering will fail.

You may include the password directly in the YAML frontmatter, but be sure not to store the R Markdown file in a public repository as the password will be visible in plain-text.

---
output:
  fidelius::html_password_protected:
    password: "pw1234!"
    output_format: rmarkdown::html_document
---

During development, you may wish to set preview = TRUE to bypass the encryption and password-protection steps in order to view the document more quickly. This option pairs very nicely with xaringan::infinite_moon_reader() to view changes in real time.

---
output:
  fidelius::html_password_protected:
    password: "pw1234!"
    preview: true
---

Styling

You may wish to style the aesthetics and text of the password landing page to your own preferences. This can be done simply by passing the stylize() function to the style argument, or by specifying style arguments directly in the YAML frontmatter.

charm("index.Rmd", style = stylize(button_text = "Open Sesame!"))

or

---
output:
  fidelius::html_password_protected:
    style:
      button_text: "Open Sesame!"
---

See ?fidelius::stylize to find out more about which aspects of the landing page can be styled.

Password Hint

Optionally, you may wish to provide a helpful hint for anyone (or yourself) trying to remember the password and gain access to the document. You can do this by passing a string to the hint argument:

charm("index.Rmd", password = "pw1234!", hint = "A very bad password!")

or

---
title: "My Protected Document"
output:
  fidelius::html_password_protected:
    password: "pw1234!"
    hint: "A very bad password!"
---

Providing a hint will include the lightweight Micromodal JavaScript library to provide a simple modal pop-up that contains your password hint.

Portability

You may specify bundle = TRUE (or bundle: true) to bundle all of the fidelius dependencies for offline use. If the input file (or output_format) is also self-contained (such as with self_contained = TRUE), the fidelius HTML document is entirely self-contained and can easily be shared with others (e.g. via email) as a standalone document. See ?charm for more details.

Password Manager

I have tried to make sure that fidelius is compatible with common password management tools (e.g. 1Pass, LastPass, etc.). If your password manager is not detecting the password field on the fidelius landing page, please file an issue that includes which browser and password manager you use, and I will work to support it.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the fidelius project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.