Frequently Asked Questions

CipherPaths is a free, portable Windows application that combines a password manager and an encrypted file manager. It stores your logins, cards, contacts and files inside a single encrypted vault that lives entirely on your own device.

Most password managers only store credentials, often in the cloud with a subscription. CipherPaths also encrypts real files — documents, photos and PDFs — alongside your passwords, keeps everything completely local, and is free. It can decrypt individual files without unlocking the whole vault, so it stays fast even with thousands of files.

Yes. CipherPaths is free to download and use, with no accounts and no monthly subscriptions.

File contents, file names and metadata are encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Your master password is turned into a key using PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512, which unwraps a random vault master key; further keys are derived with HKDF. All cryptography is provided by the open-source OpenSSL library.

Yes. Both the contents and the names of your files and folders are encrypted. On disk they appear as random text, and file sizes are padded so their true length is hidden as well.

No. Your master password is never written to disk. It is only used, in memory, to derive the keys that unlock your vault.

You can recover the vault using the recovery key shown when the vault was created. If you lose both the master password and the recovery key, the data cannot be recovered — there is no backdoor. Please print and safely store your recovery key.

Everything is stored locally in a folder you choose. Nothing is uploaded, and CipherPaths works fully offline. If you want remote access, you can place the vault inside a cloud-drive folder — it stays encrypted there too.

Yes. Because the vault is just a folder, you can keep it on a USB stick or a synced cloud folder and open it from different machines. Multiple instances of the app can even share the same vault.

Simply copy the vault folder — it remains encrypted, so backups are safe to store anywhere, including cloud storage. You can also use Export Vault to produce a plaintext copy for migration (handle that copy carefully, as it is unencrypted).

No installer is required. Download the ZIP, extract it, and run CipherPaths.exe. The executable is under 1 MB (plus the OpenSSL library).

Windows 10 and 11 are supported today. The portable encryption core already runs on Linux via a command-line tool, and a packaged Linux release is planned for the future.

Images (JPEG and PNG), PDFs and text files can be opened in the built-in viewers. The file is decrypted only in memory — no plaintext copy is written to disk. Other file types can be exported when you need them.

Not at all. You can use CipherPaths purely as an encrypted file store, or just to keep a private list of contacts, without ever entering a website credential.