About this plugin
This plugin allows you to insert a “secure form” into your website through a simple shortocde. It is usefull when you need to receive sensitive data of any kind, establishing a “safe channel”.
The data is sent encrypted with your PGP public key.
Usage
Just fill in some plugin options:
- The destination email (your email)
- Your PGP public key in ASCII armored version
Hint: to see your private key you can enter your computer console and run two commands, one to list and one to export (must have GnuPG):
gpg --list-keys gpg --armor --export username@email
Remember your public key needs to be exported in ASCII armored version, this means that will be surrounded with:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
your-long-key-string-will-be-here
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Once the shortcode is placed into a page or post, it will render a form with the following fields:
- Name
- Subject
- Message
How it works
The message field will be encrypted with your PGP public key and sent as an attachment in ASCII format to the destination email you have configured.
js library in the user who is browsing the website.
You will only be able to decrypt the content of the attached file if you have the PGP private key belonging to the public key with which the message was encrypted.
Remember that the purpose of the plugin is only to display a form on your website and encrypt the information that is sent through the “message” field. This plugin does not take care of decrypting the attached file, this task is left to each user in the way they want.
Some usage examples
- Receive secret messages
- Receiving passwords from clients or friends
- Reception of sensitive information
- Offering a private channel to sources, whistleblowers or people asking for help
Why private communication matters
Some messages cannot travel through an ordinary contact form. A source writing to a journalist, an employee reporting wrongdoing inside their own company, a lawyer receiving documents from a client, someone asking for help where asking is itself dangerous: for all of them, whether the channel is private is not a detail, it is the entire point.
A normal contact form sends the message in plain text to the web server, where it is kept in the database, in mail logs and in whatever backups the hosting provider takes. Every one of those copies is a place where it can be read, demanded or leaked. This plugin encrypts the message in the visitor’s browser, so what reaches the server is already unreadable to everyone, including you until you decrypt it with your private key, and including your hosting provider.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects both freedom of expression and privacy of correspondence, and the two hold each other up: people only speak freely when they can choose who is listening. Giving your readers a channel that does not betray them is a small, practical way of defending that.
What this plugin does not do
Encrypting the message is one piece of a larger picture, and it is only honest to say where the picture ends.
- The name, email and subject fields are not encrypted. Only the message is. Anyone who can read your server can see who wrote and what the subject was.
- The plugin does not hide the fact that someone visited your website.
- It cannot protect a message once you have decrypted it on your own computer.
If someone’s safety depends on this channel, the way they reach your site and the way you store what you receive matter just as much as the encryption itself.
Requirements
Your site must be served over HTTPS. The message is encrypted by the visitor’s browser, and browsers only allow encryption on secure connections. On a plain HTTP site no message can be sent at all.
If your site is not on HTTPS yet, ask your hosting provider for an SSL certificate, they are usually free.
In order to use this plugin you need to have or create a PGP key pair. If you don’t have your key pair generated you can browse the internet on how to generate it.
There are many ways to generate the key, each have a different impact on security.
Recommended software
- GNU Privacy Guard (Linux, OS X, Windows)
- GPG Suite (OS X)
- Gpg4win (Windows)
Support
org. If you cannot locate any topics that solve to your particular issue, post a new topic for it.
Remember this support is offered for free and can take some hours/days to answer and solve your issues.
Supporting the plugin
This plugin is free and stays free. It is maintained in the time left over from paid work, which is the honest reason why some things take a while.
es. Paying for a feature is what funds the hours behind the plugin, and whenever a change makes sense for everyone it goes into the free version too, so the work ends up in the hands of people who could never have paid for it.
That is the arrangement we like: those who can afford it pay for the tools that everyone else gets to use.
Spam protection (optional)
The plugin can add a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge to the form. It is disabled by default and does nothing until you enable it and enter your site key and secret key in the plugin settings.
The message is always encrypted in your visitor’s browser before anything is sent, with or without Turnstile.
If Cloudflare cannot be reached, submissions are allowed through and the problem is written to the diagnostic log, so an outage never costs you a legitimate message.
Privacy notices
With the default configuration, this plugin, in itself, does not:
- Track users by stealth
- Write any user personal data to the database
- Send any data to external servers
- Use cookies
External services
This plugin does not connect to any external service unless you enable Cloudflare Turnstile in its settings.
When you do enable it, the plugin relies on Cloudflare Turnstile to tell human visitors apart from bots:
- The form loads the Turnstile widget script from https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js. Loading it makes the visitor’s browser contact Cloudflare, which collects the data described in their documentation to run the challenge.
- When the form is submitted, your server sends the token produced by the widget, together with your secret key, to https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify to check whether the challenge was passed.
- The plugin never sends the message, the form fields or the visitor’s IP address to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare’s terms of service and privacy policy apply to that service.
Translations
Actually the plugin ships in English and is translated to Spanish.
You can contribute and translate this plugin to your own language.