Every now and then, while building software, a question pops into your head that won’t quite go away.
Recently, one of those questions crossed my mind:
Could a project management tool like Jira or Asana be cryptographically zero-knowledge?
Not because I believe these tools are doing anything wrong. Not because I suspect misuse. Simply because once you start thinking about encryption and trust, you naturally wonder where the limits are and why certain architectural choices are so common across the industry. Specifically, because I’ve worked on high-end enterprise projects, and there has never been any mention of Atlassian, the company behind Jira, misusing its customers’ data to obtain insider information.
That curiosity led me down a deep technical rabbit hole.
What “zero-knowledge” actually means (and what it doesn’t)
A zero-knowledge system, in the strict cryptographic sense, means:
- All content is encrypted on the client
- The service provider cannot decrypt it
- Even if they wanted to, even if compelled, the data is mathematically inaccessible
This model exists today. You see it in secure messaging tools and password managers. But you almost never see it in project management software.
That absence isn’t accidental.
Why tools like Jira and Asana don’t use zero-knowledge encryption
Products like Jira and Asana sit in a very different problem space from messaging apps.
Project management tools need to do a lot of things with your data:
- Full-text search across thousands of tasks
- Permissions and role enforcement
- Notifications and automations
- Activity feeds and analytics
- Integrations with dozens of external tools
- Increasingly, AI-powered features
All of those require the server to understand the content.
Zero-knowledge encryption breaks that assumption completely.
If the server cannot read task titles, descriptions, or comments:
- It cannot index them
- It cannot search them
- It cannot safely automate against them
- It cannot reliably collaborate in real time
You can re-introduce some of these features with advanced cryptography, but the complexity grows exponentially — and the user experience almost always suffers.
The hardest part: key management and collaboration
Encryption itself is not the hardest problem.
Sharing encrypted data with teams is.
In a collaborative tool:
- Tasks are shared across many users
- Membership changes frequently
- Permissions differ by role
- Access must be revoked when people leave
In a zero-knowledge system, this requires:
- Per-user cryptographic keys
- Key wrapping for every shared item
- Rotation and revocation strategies
- No meaningful recovery if keys are lost
This is manageable for secure messaging.
It becomes extremely fragile for long-lived shared workspaces.
What companies use instead of zero-knowledge
Since true zero-knowledge is incompatible with most project management workflows, mainstream tools rely on operational trust, backed by strong controls:
1. Encryption in transit and at rest
- TLS everywhere
- Encrypted databases and backups
- Managed key systems (KMS)
2. Strict internal access controls
- Role-based access
- Approval workflows
- Logged and audited access
3. Compliance and audits
- SOC 2
- ISO 27001
- GDPR and regional data protection laws
4. Legal and contractual guarantees
- Data Processing Agreements
- Breach notification obligations
- Clear customer ownership of data
In other words, trust is enforced by process, policy, audits, and law, not by cryptographic impossibility.
For the vast majority of teams, this is a perfectly reasonable and effective model.
Why zero-knowledge project management tools remain rare
It’s not because companies don’t care about privacy.
It’s because the trade-offs are severe:
- Worse performance
- Limited search
- Fragile collaboration
- Reduced integrations
- Minimal support and recovery options
- Higher cognitive load for users
Most teams value usability, reliability, and speed more than absolute cryptographic guarantees against the vendor itself.
And that’s a rational choice.
A more realistic future: optional client-controlled encryption
That said, the idea itself isn’t uninteresting.
A more practical direction — and one worth revisiting in the future — is customer-controlled encryption, where:
- Data is still usable by the platform
- But encryption keys are owned or controlled by the customer
- Access can be limited or revoked at the key level
- Clients get stronger guarantees without breaking UX
This approach already exists in parts of the cloud ecosystem (BYOK, customer-managed keys), and it may eventually make sense for collaboration tools as well.
Final thoughts
The question came up while thinking about trust and architecture. We are not planning on implementing this feature at the moment, we probably won’t do it later, or we might, who knows. Maybe we could offer something where people can bring their own key and encrypt their whole project, but it would have to be for solo projects.
My understanding is that zero-knowledge project management tools are technically possible.
They’re just incompatible with what most teams expect today.
Still, asking why things are built the way they are is often how better ideas emerge — even if the answer, for now, is that the trade-offs aren’t worth it, at the moment.