Are my secrets safe?

A tool that handles your secrets needs to earn your trust. This page explains the protections built into Agentknock and how you can inspect them.

Secrets are stored on your phone

Agentknock stores your sensitive values on your phone. It doesn’t maintain a cloud vault containing your secrets, so there is no server-side collection for an attacker to steal.

The relay holds encrypted messages for the exchanges that need them. It has no keys to read those messages and doesn’t keep a vault of their contents.

Secrets are protected on your phone

Someone holding your unlocked phone doesn’t have to get access to Agentknock as well. The app can require your phone’s authentication whenever it is opened, or before sensitive actions such as revealing or changing a secret.

Stored values are encrypted with keys held in the phone’s secure key store, using secure hardware where available. Copying the app’s files alone does not provide the keys needed to read your secrets.

Delivery is end-to-end encrypted

Secrets travel between your phone and the paired client in an end-to-end encrypted exchange. The relay carries the messages but cannot read or undetectably alter their protected contents.

Stealing a client’s stored pairing keys later does not let an attacker decrypt its past exchanges. The temporary encryption state used for completed deliveries is not retained by the client. The device private key, which could expose recorded exchanges, stays on your phone.

Pairing ensures the right client

During pairing, you compare the verification code on the client with the one on your phone. The code is calculated from that specific pairing attempt, so checking it detects an attempt to substitute another client.

Once paired, the client authenticates its requests using the keys established during pairing. Your phone associates each request with that client, so you know whose access you are approving.

AI approval excludes stored sensitive values

The AI reviewer sees which client is asking, what command it wants to run, which secrets it needs, and the supplied reason and review instructions. That information lets it assess the request.

The review can include captured script source. Sensitive stored values and private keys are excluded, but credentials embedded in arguments, reasons, instructions, or script source are still part of the review context. After approval, your phone provides access to the paired client through their encrypted exchange.

The code is open source

The command-line client and mobile app are fully open source. You can inspect how they store, protect, and use your secrets instead of taking our description on trust.

For CLI releases, build attestations identify the source and workflow used to produce a download. Reproducible builds let you build that source independently and compare the result with the published archive. The CLI release verification instructions explain how.

The Android verification instructions cover APK signatures, checksums, and GitHub release attestations. These checks help establish an artifact’s origin; they do not prove that the software is free of vulnerabilities.

Audit log of every action

Your phone records activity involving your secrets, including requests that are handled automatically. You can see which client requested which secret and when.

The log records approval decisions and delivery outcomes, as well as changes to secrets and client access. You can trace what was requested, what was allowed, and what happened next.

Backups are optional

Phone backups can preserve your audit log and request history, so you don’t lose the record of what happened. You can choose whether to include Agentknock data in those backups.

Backups can contain encrypted secret data, but they don’t contain the device-bound encryption keys needed to read it. Restoring a backup to another phone therefore restores the history without making the secret values readable. Disabling backups also keeps that history and encrypted data out of future backups.