Locally encrypted
Every document and every sensitive field is encrypted with AES-256-GCM on the device. The key never leaves the phone.
Security & privacy
Coming soon
Æthel
Your digital vault. Offline. Encrypted. Only yours.
Scan your ID, store any secret you have, keep the 24 words of your hardware wallet, and leave clear instructions for your family. Æthel keeps all of it on your phone, encrypted with AES-256, and never sends a byte of it anywhere.
Coming soon on theApp StoreComing soon onGoogle Play
Built on three promises
Nothing leaves your phone. Nobody else holds a key.
Zero cloud
No sync, no accounts, no servers, no telemetry, no crash reports. Your data exists only on your device.
Only you
There is no “forgot password” email. You hold the PIN and a 12-word recovery key — and with them, all the access there is.
Built with paranoia. Designed with care.
Can someone get in? How long would it take?
The two questions that matter: your phone in someone else’s hands, and your backup file on someone else’s computer. Pick your PIN or your backup password and see what an attacker is up against.
Your PINdigits
Someone with your phone, at Æthel’s lock screen
609,000 yearsFive tries, then every wrong PIN doubles the wait — 30 seconds up to 32 minutes. The wait runs on a clock that changing the phone’s date cannot skip, and a reboot starts it again rather than ending it. Turn on “Wipe after N attempts” and there is no second chance at all.
A lab running code on your phone, while it is unlocked
320 yearsEvery guess needs a key that never leaves the phone’s secure hardware — the Keystore on Android, the Secure Enclave on iPhone — and that answers only while the phone is unlocked. So guesses cannot be moved to faster machines: about one per second, on the phone itself. A locked phone cannot be made to guess at all.
A copy of the phone’s data, attacked on other computers
Not possibleWithout the hardware key inside your phone, a copied vault — even with the encrypted keys — gives no way to test a single PIN.
Æthel accepts 6 to 12 digits, and every extra digit multiplies the work by ten. It recommends 10 or more when you choose your PIN.
Your backup password
One tap in the backup dialog: six random words from a list of 7,776 — about 77 bits. Write them on paper.
Someone with your .vault file and one serious GPU rig
26 trillion yearsThe backup is meant to leave the phone, so it is protected by its password alone — no hardware key. Æthel stretches it with Argon2id at 256 MB of memory per guess — four times the PIN’s — so a rig manages a couple of hundred guesses a second, not billions.
A well-funded lab with a hundred of them
255 billion yearsMoney buys speed, and nothing else: a hundred times the hardware, a hundred times faster.
The file and its password are all it takes to open a backup — so keep the file somewhere only you reach, and let Æthel generate the password.
Times are for trying every possibility; a lucky guess lands, on average, halfway. Figures come from Æthel’s own forensic audit and are orders of magnitude, not promises.
Inside the vault
One place for everything you cannot afford to lose.
Æthel is built around the moments that matter: the day you need a document fast, the day you lose your wallet, and the day someone else has to find what you left behind.
Scan it. Encrypt it. Forget the gallery.
Point the camera at an ID card, a policy or a contract. Edges are detected and perspective is corrected; several pages become one PDF. The result is encrypted the moment you save it and never appears in your photo gallery.
- Offline text recognition picks up ID numbers and policy numbers
- The expiry date is read straight from a passport’s or ID card’s machine-readable lines
- Reminders 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before a document expires
- Four classification levels, from Public to Critical
Passwords, PINs, codes — the things you keep on sticky notes.
Twelve ready-made types cover logins, bank accounts, cards, licence keys, API keys and physical codes like the alarm or the safe. Sensitive fields are encrypted one by one and stay hidden until you hold “Reveal”.
- Critical items can never be copied
- Copied values are wiped from the clipboard after 30 seconds
- Custom categories for anything the templates miss
A seed phrase vault that behaves like a safe.
Enter 12 or 24 words one at a time; each is checked against the BIP39 word list and the checksum is verified at the end. To read them back you authenticate, hold for a moment, and get 30 seconds before they blur again.
- Every word is encrypted on its own
- No copy button — by design
- Kept out of the standard backup, with its own export
Lost your wallet? Open the plan you made on a calm day.
List what you carry — each card with the number on its back, each document with where to replace it. When the wallet is gone, Æthel walks you through blocking and replacing everything, one tap to call at a time.
Crossing a border? Leave part of the vault at home.
Before you travel, take whole compartments — Crypto, Business — off the phone, after a backup that has to leave it first. Nothing on the phone says anything was removed. When you are back, bring them home from that backup; whatever you added on the road stays.
- Removal unlocks only after the backup for exactly that selection was sent
- Seed phrases in a removed compartment get their critical backup automatically
- Changed something since the backup? Removal is refused until you make a new one
What you can keep
Far more than a password manager.
Documents
IDs, passports, policies, deeds and contracts — images or multi-page PDFs, with thumbnails that are encrypted too.
Credentials & secrets
Logins, bank accounts, cards, licence keys, alarm and safe codes, with field-level encryption.
Seed phrases
BIP39 mnemonics with word-by-word validation, timed reveal and no clipboard.
2FA codes
A built-in authenticator — scan the site’s QR code and get the 6-digit codes — plus your backup codes, ticked off as you use them.
Hardware wallets
Device, firmware, serial number and where the physical backup is kept.
Secure notes
Markdown notes with attachments. Wrap a line in ||bars|| and it stays blurred until you hold it.
Family & business vaults
Separate spaces for the family’s papers or a company’s documents, switched on when you need them.
Encrypted QR export
Move an item to another device through an encrypted QR code, without a network.
Duress mode
If someone forces you to open it, show them a different vault.
Set a second PIN. Typed under pressure, it opens a decoy vault: a separate database with its own keys, holding copies of only the compartments you chose — plus anything made up you add to it. The whole app is there, every tab, Settings and search included. Nothing is missing, so nothing gives it away.
The key to your real vault never even enters memory during a decoy session. Whoever learns the duress PIN learns the decoy — and nothing else.
- Every unlock tries every PIN and takes the same time, whichever one you typed
- Next time you open the real vault, a notice tells you the duress PIN was used
- Emergency Lock: refuse both PINs, so only the 12 words can open the vault
- Panic Wipe: erase everything, keys first, irreversibly
Identity
Car
Credentials
Seed phrases
2FA codes
Recovery
Your real vault.
Identity
Car
Its own keys, its own data. Every tab still there.
Recovery Center
Plan for the day you are not the one opening it.
A Recovery Health Score from 0 to 100 tells you how prepared you are: is the seed phrase confirmed, are the emergency contacts filled in, is the last backup recent, is the family guide written?
Leave instructions for your heirs — accounts, crypto, property, insurance — each with the person responsible. Export an Emergency Recovery Kit as a PDF that says who to call and where things are, and redacts every password and number automatically.
- Dead Man Switch: after months of silence Æthel asks “Are you OK?”
- Shamir secret sharing: split a secret into parts — say 3 of 5 — so no single part reveals anything
- Disaster guide and emergency contacts, ready when you need them
86Recovery health
- Seed phrase confirmed
- Emergency contacts
- Backup exported 9 days ago
- Family guide
Shamir secret sharing · 3 of 5
Secret rebuilt from any three parts
Getting started
Five minutes today. Peace of mind for years.
- 01
Choose your PIN
6 to 12 digits, turned into a key with Argon2id — slow on purpose, so guessing is impractical. Add your fingerprint or Face ID if you like.
- 02
Write down 12 words
Æthel generates a BIP39 recovery key and asks you for three of the words to be sure you wrote them correctly. It never stores them.
- 03
Add a duress PIN
Optional. Pick which compartments the decoy vault copies.
- 04
Pick your modules
Seed phrases, 2FA codes, hardware wallets, family or business vaults — only what you use.
- 05
Scan your first document
Tap +, point the camera, save. It is encrypted before you lift your thumb.
Under the hood
Security you can check, not just trust.
Æthel has no backend and no telemetry. The only connection it can make is a direct, encrypted transfer between your own devices on your local Wi-Fi — never to the internet. An automated architecture test fails if any other part of the app opens a connection.
id-card.jpgplain, in memory only
AES-256-GCMmaster key · Keystore / Keychain
7f3a…e91c.encprivate app folder, not the gallery
nonce12 B
ciphertext
9e 41 c7 0b 5f a2 d8 13 6e f0 3c 97 b4 21 8a 5d e6 07 c3 7b 1f 92 4e a8tag16 B
Fresh nonce every time · any tampering fails the tag check · plaintext buffers wiped after use
- File encryption
- AES-256-GCMFresh nonce per operation, 16-byte authentication tag
- Database
- SQLCipherAES-256 with HMAC-SHA512 per page — on disk it reads as random noise
- Field encryption
- HKDF per fieldA compromised field reveals nothing about the others
- PIN key
- Argon2id + hardwareThen a key that never leaves the phone: Keystore on Android, Secure Enclave on iPhone
- Key storage
- Only while unlockedBound to this device; in no cloud or system backup
- Recovery key
- BIP39, 12 words128 bits — out of reach of any hardware that exists
- Wrong PINs
- Progressive lockoutUp to 32 minutes per try — or wipe the vault after N attempts
- Auto-lock
- 5 minutesConfigurable; the app switcher shows a blank screen
- Backups
- .vault fileArgon2id at 256 MB per guess behind your password; weak ones are refused
Malware defence · Android
Before you type your PIN, it checks who could be watching.
Blocking screenshots stops pixels, not accessibility services: they read the structure of the screen and every key you tap. On the lock screen, before a single digit, Æthel names every service that could read your PIN.
It also looks for the places banking malware has to sit — reading the screen, reading notifications and one-time codes, receiving SMS, or making itself a device admin so it cannot be removed — and says where each app holding one came from. One installed from outside an app store is flagged in red.
It warns and never blocks: screen readers are also how many people use a phone. Approve the ones you recognise in the Security Dashboard.
- An approved service that comes back with a different signing key is flagged again
- While Æthel is open, other apps’ overlay windows are hidden (Android 12+)
- On iPhone, other apps cannot read Æthel’s screen at all, so there is nothing to detect
Our promise
What Æthel never does.
- Send anything to the internet — no data, no analytics, no crash reports
- Save your scans to the photo gallery
- Write a decrypted image to disk — documents open in memory and are wiped on close
- Put a password or seed phrase on the clipboard without a timer
- Show your data in the app switcher
- Ask you for an account, an email address or a subscription to the cloud
Screens
A closer look.
Questions
Good to know.
What happens if I lose my phone?
Install Æthel on the new phone, set it up, then restore your latest .vault backup with its password. Everything comes back as it was. Without the backup file and its password, nobody — including us — can recover the data. That is also why Æthel refuses weak backup passwords: the file and its password are all it takes.
What if I forget my PIN?
Your 12-word recovery key opens the vault and lets you set a new PIN. Your documents are not re-encrypted; only the way you reach the key changes.
Does Æthel need an internet connection?
No. Everything works offline. The only connection Æthel can make is a transfer between your own devices over your local Wi-Fi, when you start one.
Can you see my data or reset my access?
No. There is no server, no account and no copy of your keys anywhere but on your device. That is the point — and also why the 12 words matter so much.
How do I back up?
Export a single encrypted .vault file and keep it on a USB stick, on your computer, or send it to your laptop over the local Wi-Fi. Æthel refuses a password that is easy to guess and can generate six random words for you to write down. Seed phrases have their own separate export.
Is it the same on Android and iPhone?
Yes — the vault, the encryption and the features are the same, and on both the PIN’s key has a hardware half: the Keystore on Android, the Secure Enclave on iPhone. Both scan with the system’s document camera, which finds the edges and straightens the page. Text is read on the device by ML Kit on Android and Apple Vision on iPhone. Blocking screenshots is possible only on Android; on both, the app switcher shows a blank screen.
Which languages are available?
English, Romanian, German, French, Spanish and Italian. You can switch at any time in Settings.
Æthel is almost here.
Coming soon on the App Store and Google Play. The buttons below come alive on launch day.
Coming soon on theApp StoreComing soon onGoogle Play