Secure Encrypted Form

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

When you cannot find the answer to your question on the FAQ section, check the support forum on WordPress.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.

If your organisation needs something it does not do yet, a custom field, an integration with your own systems, or a hand setting up your key pair and the form, that work can be commissioned at charrua.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 .