Ente Locker – end-to-end encrypted vault with digital inheritance

General Project Showcase
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Hi everyone,

I’m part of the team at Ente, the people behind Ente Photos and Ente Auth. I’m excited to introduce our newest product, Ente Locker.

What’s Ente Locker?
Ente Locker is an end-to-end encrypted vault for your important documents and sensitive information - IDs, financial and insurance records, medical paperwork, recovery codes, and the kind of “in case something happens to me” information a family needs but shouldn’t have to keep in plaintext on Google Drive.

What can it do?

  • Store documents and files, plus encrypted notes, audio files, and structured fields for text-based secrets
  • Sync across Android, iOS, web, and desktop, with client-side encryption everywhere, organize into collections, and share via links
  • Create Legacy Kits, and designate contacts who can recover your vault in case you are incapacitated, via a time-delayed request and a Shamir Secret Share mechanism

How does it work?
Everything is encrypted on your device before it reaches our servers. We store only ciphertext and an encrypted master key; the key that unlocks it is derived from your password, which never leaves your device and never reaches us. When you create a Legacy Kit, Ente generates a random secret and splits it into 3 shares using Shamir Secret Share. Any 2 shares can rebuild the secret, but one is not enough. Your designated contacts can initiate recovery, but access is granted only after a delay you set - and you can cancel any request during that window - so recovery can’t be triggered silently against you.

Is it secure?
Ente is fully open source (apps and server) under AGPLv3, on our GitHub. The cryptography - libsodium, XChaCha20-Poly1305 for data, Argon2id for key derivation - is shared with Ente Photos, whose architecture was independently audited by Cure53. For the Legacy Kit feature, the server never sees the kit secret, the shares, or your decrypted recovery key.

Who is behind the project?
Ente is a small, independent team building privacy-focused software. We’re bootstrapped - no VC and no institutional funding. We build products, people pay us for them, and that’s the whole model - we don’t monetize data or serve ads. Our products, Ente Photos and Ente Auth, are already recommended on Privacy Guides.

How much does it cost?
Ente Locker is free up to 100 items and 1GB total storage. You can increase this limit to 1000 items and 10GB total storage with any Ente paid plan. So Locker’s paid limits are included with any Ente Photos subscription, but Locker storage is separate from Photos storage.

How can I get started?
You can download Ente Locker from our website and the app stores, and everything is on our GitHub if you’d rather read the code first.

This is a young product and we’d genuinely value the feedback of this community - on the Legacy Kit design especially. Happy to answer questions on the crypto, the recovery flow, jurisdiction etc. Thanks!

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Can you add private payments with Monero?

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I think Ente locker has a real opportunity to serve as a way to display documents digitally.

For example, in the US it is common for drivers to store their insurance cards on their phone for display to law enforcement. It would be bad practice to hand your (now) insecure device to another person. I don’t know if technically feasible but a method that would allow display of an electronic document with the phone in a locked state would be great.

There are a few other examples of this, but felt car insurance is the most notable.

As an aside, I still think searching of the content text of a pdf with OCR is long overdue in locker.

I feel these features would allow Locker to distinguish itself beyond password managers.

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Relevant earlier discussion: Ente Locker - New app from Ente

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This is an interesting use case (display Locker file in locked state), and one that we hadn’t actually considered to be honest. This functionality already exists within Ente Photos, so should be possible for Locker as well. We will have to assess the scale of the problem this solves. But really appreciate the suggestion!

searching of the content text of a pdf with OCR

This is on the product roadmap :slight_smile:

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Adding crypto as a payment option is something we want to do for the Ente ecoystem as a whole. Just haven’t gotten to it yet.

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On Android you can “Pin” an app to lock use of the rest of the system, but it’s not the most secure way. You could have Ente Locker in a separate empty profile with nothing more than the app, but it would still allow user to inspect other content within the app.

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Yes and having open access to an app that is intended to contain your life’s secrets is not really the intent.

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Great to know you. I frequently land into troubles trying to log into my ente account. The last time was from my duckduckgo privacy browser. The problem has been resolved now.

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So ente locker is something like the digi locker ?