Kinship Vault

An encrypted document vault for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The company behind it holds no key to your data.

The problem

Most of us keep important paperwork in a scatter: a passport photo in the camera roll, the will in a drawer, a health card scanned into email years ago, the deed in cloud storage behind a password anyone with your inbox could reset. It works until a phone is lost or someone needs to find things fast.

Kinship Vault puts all of it in one place, encrypted by the hardware in the device you already own. The constraint it's built around is unusual: the developers cannot read your vault, and there's no mechanism by which they could be compelled to.

What it does

Reads the documents you carry. Point the camera at a passport, licence, health card, or tax form and it extracts the structured fields automatically, across 100+ document types worldwide. On Mac you drag the file in. Encryption happens before anything touches storage.

Watches expiry dates. Reminders at 90, 30, 7, and 1 day. The dates never leave the device, so no third party learns when your passport lapses.

Organizes by person. Tag documents to family members and filter to one person's records in a click.

Stays useful in an emergency. Blood type, allergies, ICE contacts, and travel ID are readable in one tap while the vault is locked. The rest stays sealed.

Plans for after. A Legacy section holds final wishes, accounts, and sealed letters.

The security model

There is no master password. The root secret is a 256-bit key generated on device, either 32 bytes from the OS secure random generator or rebuilt from a BIP39 phrase. Real entropy, nothing to brute-force.

That key is wrapped by the Secure Enclave using ECIES, a hardware key that cannot leave the chip, and unwrapped only after Face ID or Touch ID. Each document gets its own key derived with HKDF (HMAC-SHA-256), encrypted with AES-256-GCM.

No key reaches a server. A breach or subpoena on the company's side yields nothing, because nothing of yours is there. No account, no email, no reset link, which removes the most common attack surface in consumer software. Backup is optional and encrypted into your own iCloud.

Recovery without a middleman

You choose the model in advance: a written passphrase, a recovery network where trusted people each hold a fragment (any three restore access, one alone opens nothing), or a Dead Man's Switch on iPhone and iPad. Pick any, all, or none. Recovery runs directly between you and the people you chose, cryptographic rather than administrative.

Across devices

One vault, all your hardware. The device holding it shows a QR for sixty seconds and the new device scans it. The key passes directly between the two machines, documents come from your own encrypted iCloud backup, and nothing routes through the company. Works in either direction.

The Mac app

Native SwiftUI, macOS 14+. Real sidebar and split view, menu bar shortcuts (⌘N, ⌘L, ⌃⌘S), Mac-style preferences, drag-and-drop import, light or dark. The full vault, not a viewer.

The company publishes its own caveats, which is rare and telling. No camera scanning on Mac, so you import instead. macOS can't hide the pairing QR from screenshots the way iOS does, and the app says so on screen. The Dead Man's Switch is iPhone and iPad only, since a desktop app that sits closed for weeks can't promise reliable check-ins. Macs without Touch ID wrap a copy of the key with a PBKDF2 key from your PIN, so pick one you don't reuse.

Pricing

One universal purchase across iPhone, iPad, and Mac on the same Apple Account. Subscription costs $1.99 monthly or $14.99 yearly. Lifetime premium is available at $39.99

Who it's for

Parents managing a household's paperwork, anyone handling an aging relative's records, frequent travelers with multi-country IDs, and people who've decided a vendor holding a recoverable key is a liability, not a convenience. The trade is real: set recovery up deliberately, because nobody can rescue you if you don't.

Maker