What If 1Password and Obsidian Had a Baby

You encrypt your passwords. Obviously. You'd never store "bank_password: chunkymonkey42" in a plain text file on your desktop. That would be insane.

But then you open your notes app and type things like:

• Your social security number "just so I don't forget"
• Therapy session reflections
• The equity split you're negotiating with your cofounder
• API keys you're "temporarily" pasting somewhere
• A journal entry about the worst day of your life
• That draft message to your ex you'll never send

All of it sits in Notion, Google Keep, or Apple Notes — apps where the company can read every word. Notion's employees can access your workspace. Google trains models on your data. Evernote once tried to update their policy to let staff read your notes for "machine learning purposes" before the internet lost its mind.

Your passwords get a vault. Your deepest thoughts get a prayer.

I'm a security engineer. I break into systems for a living — cloud infrastructure, APIs, applications. I've seen the inside of companies' databases. I know what "we take your privacy seriously" actually means in practice (usually nothing). And at some point I looked at my own notes and realized: I'd built threat models for Fortune 500 companies but never once for the place where I do my actual thinking.

So I built the thing that should exist but didn't.

Scrinium: The Short Version

Take 1Password's security model — zero-knowledge encryption, where the server literally cannot read your data even if someone holds a gun to its head — and put Obsidian's writing experience on top of it. Markdown, clean UI, files that belong to you.

That's Scrinium.

Your notes are encrypted on your device before they leave. The server stores ciphertext. Not "encrypted at rest" (which means the company has the key). Not "encrypted in transit" (which just means HTTPS). Actually, fully, mathematically zero-knowledge encrypted. If someone subpoenas the server, they get gibberish. If someone breaches the database, gibberish. If I personally decide I want to read your notes, I get gibberish.

This isn't a feature toggle. It's how the architecture works. The server is designed to be useless without your key.

Why Markdown Matters

Most encrypted note apps feel like punishment. They lock your content in proprietary formats, make export painful, and act like they're doing you a favor by keeping your data hostage behind encryption.

Scrinium uses Markdown because your notes should outlive any app — mine included. Markdown is plain text with formatting. It works in VS Code, Obsidian, a terminal, a printed page, or carved into a rock if it comes to that. If Scrinium disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be yours, still readable, still useful.

I've watched people lose years of writing when apps shut down or changed their export format. Plain text doesn't have that failure mode.

What's Already Built

Scrinium is live and usable today. But a few features push it beyond "just another encrypted notes app":

Burner Notes — Create notes that self-destruct after a set time or number of views. Need to share a password with someone? A one-time access code? A message that should not exist by Friday? Write it as a burner note, share the link, and it evaporates on schedule. No trace, no recovery.

Dead Man's Switch — Designate notes to be delivered to chosen recipients if you stop checking in. This sounds dramatic until you think about it for ten seconds: do you have important information that someone would need if something happened to you? Recovery codes, account details, instructions, things you never said? Dead Man's Switch handles it without requiring you to give anyone access while you're alive.

What's Coming

Two features I'm actively building that I think are genuinely new:

Local-First AI — Search and summarization powered by models that run entirely on your device. Most "AI-powered" note apps send your content to a server for processing, which defeats the purpose of encryption. Scrinium's approach: the AI runs locally, your notes never leave your machine, and you still get intelligent features. No API calls. No cloud. No "we use your data to improve our models." (In development)

Steganographic Export — Hide your encrypted notes inside ordinary-looking image files. A photo of a sunset that's actually your encrypted journal. This sounds like spy movie nonsense until you consider that in some parts of the world, the existence of encrypted data itself is a red flag. For journalists, activists, researchers, and anyone in a situation where "what's in that encrypted folder?" is a dangerous question, steganographic export turns your notes into something nobody thinks to look at. (In development)

Who This Is For

Let me be direct about what Scrinium is not. It's not a Notion replacement. If you want databases, Kanban boards, and team wikis, use Notion — it's great at that. It's not an Obsidian replacement either. If you want graph views, community plugins, and a second brain system, use Obsidian — it's great at that too.

Scrinium is for the notes you wouldn't put in either of those apps.

The vulnerability research you haven't disclosed yet. The client-privileged legal notes. The source names behind your next story. The business plan you're not ready to share with your cofounder. The journal entries that are nobody's business. The draft of what you'd want someone to know if you weren't around to say it.

If you've ever hesitated before typing something — if you've ever thought "maybe I shouldn't write this here" — that's the moment Scrinium was built for.

Try It

Scrinium is live now at scrinium-note.com. Free tier, no tracking. Start writing in seconds.

If you're a developer or security person, I'd love your feedback. Try to break it. Tell me what's missing. The best security tools are sharpened by people who think like attackers.

You can find me on GitHub at th0t3p, or follow along for updates as I build out the roadmap.

I'm an independent security engineer building privacy-first tools. If you're interested in encryption, AI security, or the indie developer journey, follow along — more is coming.