CipherVault

A self-hosted, post-quantum encrypted file store for iOS, built on the Cipher Station protocol. Your files live on a station you run. Nothing is uploaded in the clear, there is no company in the middle, and no account anyone can close.

Its sibling app, CipherFrame, shares the same pairing and crypto foundation and puts a photo/video feed on top of the same station.

What it does

Feature	Where
Pair to a station by URL + 6-digit PIN	Views/Onboarding, ViewModels/OnboardingViewModel.swift
Pair to several stations and switch between them	Services/Storage/CredentialStore.swift, Views/Settings
Browse, upload, preview, and download encrypted files	Views/Files, ViewModels/FileBrowserViewModel.swift
Share individual files with specific followers	Views/Files/CipherShareView.swift
Follow other stations and read what they shared with you	Views/Shared, ViewModels/SharedFilesViewModel.swift
Show a QR code for your station; scan someone else's to follow	Views/Settings/StationQRCodeSheet.swift, Views/Shared/QRScannerSheet.swift
Recover a station whose address changed, via its IPNS record	Services/IPFS/IPNSRecordResolver.swift
Face ID / Touch ID lock	Services/Storage/BiometricAuthService.swift

How the encryption works

Files are encrypted on the device before upload. Each file gets a fresh symmetric key; that key is sealed into per-recipient envelopes with ML-KEM-768, and requests are signed with ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 203 / 204). The station stores ciphertext and fans out envelopes — it never receives a plaintext file.

Two things worth being straight about, because "post-quantum" invites assumptions:

• This is not Signal-style end-to-end encryption between users. Your station recovers the symmetric key in order to re-seal it for a new device or a new follower (/rewrap). The threat model is "no cloud provider can read my files", not "not even my own server can". That is the point of self-hosting — but on managed hosting, the operator runs that station.
• There is no forward secrecy. Device keypairs are long-lived, because the product's job is to open a file you saved two years ago on a phone you bought last week. A ratcheting protocol deliberately destroys that ability. The two goals are in direct tension and this app chose retention.

Addressing: two names, one permanent

A station publishes a IPNS name (k51…) — permanent, derived from its own key, and what you hand to other people. It also has a tunnel URL, which is what a client actually connects to and which changes every time the tunnel restarts. Clients resolve the IPNS name to discover the current URL, so nothing has to be re-shared when it rotates. That is why the QR code encodes the IPNS name and not the address.

IPNS records are fetched as signed records via delegated routing and verified locally with Ed25519 (IPNSRecordResolver.swift), so a malicious router cannot forge where your station lives.

Build

Requires Xcode 15+ and iOS 17+.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open CipherVault.xcodeproj

The project file is generated from project.yml; regenerate after adding sources. Dependencies resolve through SPM on first build: SwiftKyber, SwiftDilithium, and swift-sodium.

There is also a standalone test suite for the credential store and its multi-station migration, which runs without Xcode:

bash Tests/run-tests.sh

You need a station

The app is a client — it does nothing on its own. Run one from the cipher-station repo, then pair by entering its URL and the 6-digit PIN it prints.

Status

Working software that one person uses daily, not a product. It has not had an external security audit. Constants.clientName is "drive" — that string is the client's bucket key in the station manifest, so changing it orphans files already uploaded.