How Raanar encrypts your data

The short version

Every organization on Raanar can turn on two independent layers of encryption, and can prove to a third party that they are active. Nothing is enabled silently: your organization's admin switches each layer on and holds the corresponding keys or recovery codes.

Tier 1 — client-side encryption (operator-blind)

Private notes your team writes — contact notes, student notes, ticket descriptions — are encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM before they are sent to us. The encryption key is generated on your device and never reaches our servers; we store only copies wrapped by your admins' passphrases and by a one-time recovery code that only you have seen. Neither Raanar staff nor our AI features can read these fields.

The honest consequence: if every admin forgets their passphrase and the recovery code is lost, that data is permanently unreadable. There is no server-side reset — that is precisely the guarantee.

Tier 2 — encryption at rest (server-side)

WhatsApp message content is envelope-encrypted in the database with a key unique to your organization. This protects database dumps, disks, and backups. Because the server holds this key at runtime, search, previews, and AI suggestions keep working over your messages.

What we deliberately do NOT claim

• This is not end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp. Meta delivers messages to Raanar in plaintext by construction; Tier 2 protects them at rest on our side. Only Tier-1 fields are unreadable by the operator.
• Search indexes derived from your messages (for the AI Suggest feature) are built from plaintext and are not themselves encrypted.
• Encryption does not replace access control: your team members with accounts still see your inbox — that is the product.

How to verify it yourself (or hire someone to)

1. Your organization admin opens Settings → Security and clicks Download verification artifact. This file contains: the published key fingerprints, a cryptographically signed statement of your encryption status, a tamper-evident log of every key event since encryption was enabled, and a sample of your stored records (as hashes — no content).
2. Anyone — you or an external auditor — runs the open verification script scripts/verify-encryption.mjs from the Raanar source against that file, fully offline. It re-computes the audit log's hash chain, checks the signature, and confirms every sampled record really is ciphertext under your published key.
3. Repeat later with the --previous flag and an older artifact: this proves the history is append-only — the operator cannot quietly rewrite key events or retroactively "unencrypt" without breaking the chain.

None of these checks require trusting Raanar — only the key fingerprints your own admin recorded when enabling encryption.

Questions

Ask your organization's administrator, or contact the platform operator. Technical details live in the Raanar repository's architecture notes.