Security

Important warning

AxiomVault is still in early development and is not production ready.

Security model

• Client-side encryption first
• Zero-knowledge architecture as a design goal
• Authenticated encryption on every chunk
• Chunk ordering protection
• Memory zeroization for key material
• Constant-time comparisons where appropriate
• No plaintext secrets in logs

Crypto and data protection

Trust assumptions

AxiomVault’s security depends on these assumptions:

• Build artifacts are produced from reviewed source.
• Rust’s memory safety guarantees hold outside explicitly-audited unsafe blocks.
• The underlying cryptographic primitives remain sound.
• The OS kernel and FUSE subsystem correctly enforce mount permissions.

Key hierarchy

flowchart TD
P[User password] --> A[Argon2id]
A --> PK[Password KEK]
PK --> WMK[Wrapped master key]
R[24-word recovery mnemonic] --> B[Blake2b context derivation]
B --> RK[Recovery KEK]
RK --> WMK
WMK --> MK[Master key in memory after unlock]
MK --> FK[Derived file and directory keys]

The master key is randomly generated and stored only in wrapped form. Two independent KEKs can unwrap it: one from the password and one from the recovery mnemonic.

File encryption

Files are encrypted using chunked streaming encryption. Each chunk is independently authenticated, and chunk indices are included in authenticated data to help detect reordering or truncation.

Security practices

• Dependency auditing with cargo audit
• Secret scanning with gitleaks
• Lint enforcement with cargo clippy -D warnings
• // SAFETY: comments for every unsafe block
• Zeroize and ZeroizeOnDrop on sensitive key material
• Constant-time comparisons for sensitive equality checks

What this page does not claim

This page describes the intended design and current implementation direction. It does not claim:

• an external security audit
• completed hardening across all platforms
• a stable long-term vault format guarantee
• safety against a compromised endpoint
• implemented MCP-based security controls
• implemented YubiKey or other hardware-key backed unlock flows

Related pages

• Threat Model
• MCP Status
• YubiKey and Hardware Keys
• Current Limitations

Supported versions

Only the latest release receives security patches.