Scheduled
5 min read By NT²
Revoke what you already sent
Tech
After a share leaves your vault, “did they open it?” and “can I kill it?” are sender questions. The answers live in a local outbox—not a cloud mailbox of readable mail.
Tagged: local-first
33 posts
Scheduled
4 min read By NT²
Searchable metadata, sealed field values
Tech
A vault that cannot find a title is unusable. A vault that full-text indexes every password on a server is not a vault. The boundary is projected metadata versus sealed field values.
Scheduled
5 min read By NT²
Compose domains from one type system
Tech
A medical pack and an IT pack should not each reinvent “expiry date.” Domains grow by composing a shared semantic catalog into category templates—then enabling the packs you need.
Scheduled
2 min read By NT²
A vault that never needed a US cloud account
Stories
You were asked to upload passport scans and bank PDFs to yet another US-hosted app. You wondered why your tenancy proof needs a California server.
Scheduled
5 min read By NT²
Semantic columns, not form widgets
Tech
A password field is not “a secret text box on this screen.” It is a semantic column type the whole vault understands—masking, health, share defaults, and wire shape included.
Scheduled
6 min read By NT²
Slots, not a blank page
Tech
A passport, a bank account, an API key, and a seed phrase are not the same kind of text. A vault that treats them as one blank page will always ask you to remember the structure yourself.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Replica batch under the hood — packet shapes
Tech
Blind sync is easier to trust when you can picture the packet. The edge sees shapes, sizes, and progress—not titles, notes, or a searchable attic of your secrets.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Threat model, 2026: browsers and extensions
Tech
Threat models age with browsers. This 2026 refresh keeps the residual risks named—XSS, unlocked theft, hostile extensions, origin supply chain—and checks which defenses still hold when the client world moves.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
Benchmarks from a 10k-item OPFS vault
Tech
A large local vault is not proven by a slogan. It is proven by measuring the paths people actually use—first page after unlock, debounced search, FTS versus filter queries—and by being honest about what those numbers do not mean.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Offline-capable is not sync later if lucky
Tech
Many apps call themselves offline-capable when they mean a read-only cache and a queue that hopes the tower returns. A local-first vault puts full CRUD on the device first. Sync is an optional second path.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
XSS steals sessions elsewhere; here keys are non-extractable
Tech
A vault that advertises invincibility is selling theater. NT² names the residual risks—XSS while unlocked, a stolen unlocked device, a hostile extension—and designs so those failures do not also become password oracles or exportable key dumps.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
.nt2backup as a sovereignty format
Tech
Local-first only means ownership if you can leave with an encrypted snapshot the cloud never had to hold. .nt2backup is that snapshot: portable vault profile sections and sealed payloads in a file you control.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Same vault UI in browser, PWA, and desktop shells
Tech
Unlock, list, search, and settings should not fork into three products. NT² Vault keeps one vault UI and lets each shell own only what the platform must own: how durable files live on that device.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Vault profile is section KV, not one mega-row
Tech
Salt, Key DID public material, sync cursors, and onboarding prefs are not one fat SQL row. They live as named vault profile sections—so backup, sync, and unlock can each touch only what they need.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Schema v60 and incremental migration
Tech
A local vault is a real SQLite database on your device. When the product ships schema v60, launch-era vaults must upgrade in place—not force a wipe because the CREATE statement changed in the source tree.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Wrong password must fail closed
Tech
Unlock is not a best-effort decrypt of everything you own. NT² checks a small local verifier first. Wrong password fails closed: the vault stays locked, and the UI stays honest.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
CBF is how structured fields leave RAM
Tech
A credential is a map of fields while you edit it. The moment those fields must survive a lock, a restart, or a replica, they need a portable ciphertext shape—not a JSON dump waiting for the next reader.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
Auto-lock is a memory hygiene problem
Tech
Encryption at rest is incomplete if the decrypted key handle outlives the unlocked session. NT² treats auto-lock as memory hygiene: non-extractable CryptoKeys, in-memory only, cleared on idle, refresh, and tab close.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
SQLite in a Web Worker is not optional
Tech
A local-first vault needs a real relational engine on device. Putting that engine on the UI thread makes every page query compete with paint and input. NT² Vault runs SQLite in a Web Worker, behind typed messages and a single lock chain, so the list can stay responsive while the database stays honest.
Scheduled
1 min read By NT²
Already local-first, missing structure
Stories
If you already keep secrets in a local database, you may not need convincing about the cloud. You may need better structure.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
Relay indexes ciphertext; Inbox stays local
Tech
A cloud can help deliver sealed packages without becoming the place where pending shares live as readable mail. Relay indexes ciphertext. Inbox stays on the device.
Scheduled
1 min read By NT²
Your data, your jurisdiction
Stories
Where data lives shapes who can touch it, process it, subpoena it, lose it, or monetize it.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
One unlocked vault per tab — by design
Tech
Opening the same vault in two browser tabs is normal. Letting both tabs write the same on-device SQLite file is not. NT² Vault elects one Writer and keeps every other unlocked tab as a follower.
Scheduled
7 min read By NT²
Metadata in SQLite, ciphertext in BlobStore
Tech
A vault needs to know which files belong to which items, how large they are, and how to unwrap their keys. It does not need those encrypted bytes sitting inside the relational database that answers those questions.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
FTS5 for titles; table scan when filters win
Tech
Local search is not one query shape. Free-text wants a full-text index on titles and search text. Category, trash, archive, and similar filters want ordinary table predicates. The product switches strategy so the UI never has to ship the whole vault into memory to feel searchable.
Scheduled
8 min read By NT²
Never load the whole vault into Svelte state
Tech
A local vault can hold thousands of structured items without becoming a giant in-memory array. The durable store stays in SQLite. The UI holds only a paged window of lightweight list rows, rendered through a virtual list.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
No password reset, by design
Tech
“Contact support to reset your password” sounds reassuring. For an encrypted vault, it also reveals who ultimately controls access. NT² chooses a harder promise: recovery material stays with you, not our help desk.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
Blind replica sync on the edge
Tech
Sync does not have to turn a local vault into a cloud database. The edge can identify an account, store opaque replica frames, and deliver updates without learning what those updates contain.
Scheduled
9 min read By NT²
Why our vault SQLite database lives in OPFS, not IndexedDB
Tech
SQLite wants a file. A privacy vault wants durable relational storage that stays fast as its item count, indexes, and encrypted attachments grow. Putting a SQLite virtual file system on IndexedDB can bridge those worlds, but it makes the bridge part of every database operation. For NT² Vault, the browser vault file belongs in the Origin Private File System.
9 min read By NT²
Unlocking a local vault is not logging in to the cloud
Tech
One screen can make two security events look like a single login. We keep them separate because opening encrypted data and proving an identity to a server are different jobs with different risks.
9 min read By NT²
One key per object: envelope encryption inside NT² Vault
Tech
A vault can encrypt everything with one key and still claim that its data is encrypted. We wanted a more useful boundary: each item and attachment gets its own content encryption key, while the vault key protects those keys.
9 min read By NT²
The KDF salt stays on your device
Tech
A salt is not a secret. Still, where it lives changes who can assemble a password-guessing system. NT² keeps the KDF salt and password verifier with the local vault, so unlocking begins and ends on the device.
6 min read By NT²
Why host a heavy server when a PWA can do everything locally? Built a zero-server privacy vault.
Tech
In the era of massive cloud-first applications, we often overlook a powerful alternative: the Progressive Web App (PWA). Why maintain a heavy, expensive, and potentially vulnerable server infrastructure when the modern browser is capable of running a full-featured, secure, and high-performance application entirely on the user's device?