An offline password, identity, and secret vault. No server, no account, no cloud, no telemetry. Everything happens on your own machine.

Install in one line ↓ · How it works · Why I built this

Pick your OS, paste one line into a terminal. That is the entire install.

macOS / Linux

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/voyb/aegis-vault/main/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/voyb/aegis-vault/main/install.ps1 | iex

That downloads the right build for your OS, drops it in ~/Aegis, and launches it. No admin rights, no package manager, no dependencies, nothing left behind if you delete the folder. First launch asks you to choose a master password, and you are in.

Aegis stores your accounts: usernames, passwords, API keys, SSH keys, database credentials, notes, encrypted under one master password you choose. It runs as a single local web page; there is no backend and no network call of any kind.

Everything is organized by platform (Discord, GitHub, a custom service, whatever you add), and each platform holds any number of accounts. Every account is one of four types, each with the fields that actually matter for it:

1. Run the install command above. Aegis opens in its own window.
2. Choose a master password. This is the only password you will ever need to remember, write it down somewhere safe until it is memorized.
3. Click Add Platform, pick GitHub (or type any custom name), then Add Account.
4. Pick the account type. For a GitHub personal access token, choose API Key, paste it into the Key field, tag it with scopes like repo, workflow, and save.
5. Click into Password Generator and switch to Passphrase mode for something you could actually read over the phone, or Characters mode for maximum entropy. Either way, copy it straight into the field you needed it for.
6. Open Security and read exactly what the encryption underneath you does and does not protect against. No app should ask for your secrets without telling you that up front.

That is the whole workflow. Everything else, the duress vault, TOTP unlock, encrypted backups, is there when you want it and invisible when you do not.

vs. Bitwarden / 1Password: no servers to maintain, no cloud account, no subscription, and nothing to be compromised in when the vendor eventually is. Your vault is not on a target list because there is no list.

vs. KeePass / KeePassXC: a modern web-based interface in a single file instead of a heavier native client, with typed profiles for API keys, SSH keys, and database credentials built in from the start rather than stuffed into generic notes fields.

I wanted three things in one tool: a genuinely secure password manager, a generator that produces passwords no realistic attack ever cracks, and a profile display and management system that treats an API key or an SSH key as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought bolted onto a username and password field. Nothing on the market did all three without also wanting my data on their servers.

Everything after that first decision got filtered through one equation, Alex Hormozi's value equation:

Value = (Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay x Effort and Sacrifice)

That is not a slogan I bolted on afterward, it is the actual design process. Every feature had to either raise the top of that fraction or shrink the bottom, or it did not ship.

• Dream outcome: your secrets are actually safe, provably, forever, not "safe until the company that holds them has a bad quarter."
• Perceived likelihood of achievement: real, named cryptography (Argon2id, AES-256-GCM), and a Security page inside the app that tells you exactly what it protects against and what it does not, instead of marketing copy.
• Time delay: one line in a terminal to a running app. No signup, no email verification, no onboarding flow.
• Effort and sacrifice: no server to configure, no subscription, no account, single executable, works the moment you have it.

Maximize the top, shrink the bottom. That is the whole design brief.

I started this in February, on a bare index.html file, because I wanted a password manager that could not be taken from me by someone else's bad decision. Every serious vault I looked at lived on a company's servers, and a server is just a promise: a promise the company stays funded, stays honest, stays un-hacked, and never gets acquired by someone with different priorities. I did not want to store my accounts as a bet on a stranger's uptime. If a provider gets breached or shuts down, that is their emergency. I did not want it to be mine too.

So I built it to have nothing to breach. No server means no server to hack. No account means no database of everyone's vaults sitting on one target. The only copy of your data lives on your machine, encrypted, and the only way in is the password in your head. That is not a compromise version of a real password manager, it is the actual threat model most people should want.

What kept me at it for months after the first working version was honestly just that I like building things. Every feature that got added came from actually using the app and wanting more from it: typed credential profiles because a raw username and password field is the wrong shape for an SSH key, a duress vault because "what if someone forces me to unlock this" is a real question worth a real answer, a password generator that shows its work in actual entropy bits instead of a vague strength bar. It grew the way software should grow, from use, not from a spec written in advance.

Cipher: AES-256-GCM (authenticated encryption). Key derivation: Argon2id (64 MiB memory-hard), with a PBKDF2-SHA256 (600,000 iterations) fallback on hosts where WebAssembly is unavailable. Your derived key exists in memory only and is wiped on lock, nothing is ever written to disk unencrypted.

What this actually protects against: if someone obtains the encrypted vault itself, a stolen backup file, a copied browser storage file, a disk image, they cannot recover your master password, the derived key, or any plaintext without the master password itself. That holds regardless of how long they hold the ciphertext or what future computing power they bring to it, as long as the underlying primitives stay uncompromised.

What it cannot protect against: an attacker with live control of your unlocked device. While the vault is open, plaintext exists in memory and on screen, no software-only vault can prevent capture of what is actively being displayed. Auto-lock (5 minutes idle), clipboard auto-clear (30 seconds after copying a secret), and never transmitting plaintext anywhere shrink that window, nothing shrinks it to zero. This is true of every password manager, not a weakness unique to Aegis. The in-app Security page states this plainly instead of overselling what encryption can do.

Extra layers, honestly scoped:

• Sentinel: optional TOTP (authenticator app) unlock. A convenience lock for shoulder-surfers and walk-ups, not a second wall: a 6-digit code is too small to derive an encryption key from, so enrolling it seals your master password on-device under a key derived from the authenticator secret. Your master password remains the strong path.
• Duress vault: a second password that opens a completely separate, independently encrypted vault pre-filled with plausible accounts, in case you are ever forced to unlock the app. It is a detection and coercion feature, not a disguise applied to the real vault, the real vault's ciphertext is never touched by it.

No anti-debugger tricks, no corrupt-the-data-on-tamper logic, no self-destruct. A wrong key already fails AES-GCM's authentication tag, indistinguishable from noise, with zero risk of a false trigger destroying real data. That is the honest version of "wrong key gets nothing."

Two modes: character-based (up to 100 characters, configurable charset, CSPRNG-sourced via crypto.getRandomValues) and passphrase-based (4 to 10 words from the EFF's 1,296-word list, also CSPRNG-drawn). Both show real entropy, real odds of a correct guess, and real time-to-crack figures, expressed as actual numbers, not a comparison to the age of the universe.

pip install pyinstaller pillow
pyinstaller aegis.spec --noconfirm

Produces dist/Aegis.exe (Windows), dist/Aegis.app (macOS), or dist/Aegis (Linux, pair it with linux/aegis.desktop for a menu entry). Or just run python aegis_launcher.py directly, no build step needed.

On first launch you will be asked to choose a master password. It is never stored anywhere and there is no recovery, losing it means losing the vault. Back it up regularly from Backup & Keys, Export .vlt backup, the exported file is the same ciphertext, still locked by your master password, safe to store anywhere.

Does it sync across devices? Not automatically, there is no server to sync through, that is the whole point. Export a .vlt backup from Backup & Keys and copy it to your other device, or copy the whole Aegis folder. Manual, on purpose.

What if I forget my master password? There is no recovery. That is not a missing feature, it is what "no backdoor" actually means. Write it down somewhere safe until it is memorized.

Why does the installer need internet if this is an offline app? The installer downloads the app once. After that, index.html itself never makes a network call, ever, you can check by watching your network monitor while using it, or just reading the file yourself, the whole thing (markup, styling, and logic together) is under 1,700 lines.

Is the crypto audited by a third party? Not yet, formally. It uses standard, named primitives (Argon2id, AES-256-GCM) through WebCrypto and hash-wasm rather than anything custom, and the code is small enough to actually read. Audits and review are welcome.

Can I trust a password manager that is a single HTML file? That file is exactly what runs, there is no build step hiding what ships. Open it in a text editor and read it. The released executables are built from that same file by public CI, see the Actions tab.

What happens if I lose the device? Whatever your last .vlt backup has. Back it up the way you would back up anything else you cannot afford to lose.

Security tools should not ask to be taken on faith. Every release binary is built in the open by GitHub Actions directly from the tagged commit, not on my machine, so the build log is the proof it matches the source.

Code reviews, security audits, and pull requests are genuinely welcome. A tool like this gets better with more eyes on it, not fewer.

index.html          the entire application, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, no framework
vendor/              Argon2id (hash-wasm) and the EFF diceware word list
aegis_launcher.py    cross-platform launcher (Windows/macOS/Linux)
aegis.spec           PyInstaller build spec for the packaged executables
install.sh           one-line installer for macOS/Linux
install.ps1          one-line installer for Windows
icon/                app icon: .ico (Windows), .icns (macOS), .png (Linux)
social/              README banner and demo GIF
linux/               Linux .desktop entry template
.github/workflows/   CI that builds all three platform executables on tag push

MIT, see LICENSE.