Research files for clinical researchers: your own log

How SealedBrief keeps the index current

SealedBrief is built for professionals who are personally responsible for other people’s confidential information. SealedBrief can write a short summary under a document the first time you open it, generated on your own machine and only for the files you actually look at.

Your documents and your questions stay on your own machine. SealedBrief indexes documents where they sit and re-embeds a file only when its contents actually change, detected by a SHA-256 hash of the file. Beyond PDFs and Word files, SealedBrief indexes spreadsheets, slide decks, email files, and OpenDocument files, extracting their text on your own machine. With a matter or patient workspace active, retrieval is limited to that workspace’s own folders, so a question won’t pull passages from files outside it.

Can you click through to the source page?

When the model cannot ground an answer in your documents, it signals that it could not ground the answer instead of inventing a citation.

Retrieval blends meaning-based vector search with exact keyword search, so a specific case number, statute cite, or identifier is found even when a purely semantic match would miss it. A grounded answer carries its own receipts: how many passages were retrieved, how many reranked, how many cited, and that the exchange made zero network calls. Click a PDF citation and SealedBrief opens the source document at the page the answer drew from. SealedBrief extracts a document’s text without running anything inside it: spreadsheet and presentation macros are opened read-only, HTML scripts are stripped before parsing, and YAML is parsed with code tags disabled.

Where that event history lives

Workspace names and conversation titles are stored encrypted, so a client or patient name used as a label isn’t written to disk in the clear.

The core database and full-text search index are protected with SQLCipher AES-256 page encryption. Document text and metadata are encrypted with field-level AES-256-GCM, using HKDF-SHA256 subkeys and a fresh random nonce per record. The catalogue of which files you’ve indexed, along with their metadata, is stored inside the encrypted SQLCipher database rather than in a plaintext list on disk. Each AES-256-GCM-encrypted field in the vault carries an authentication tag, so tampered or corrupted data is rejected on read instead of silently returning the wrong text.

Why SealedBrief keeps no escrow copy of your key

SealedBrief keeps no escrow copy of your encryption key; if your keychain entry is lost and you kept no backup, the vault cannot be recovered.

Your vault’s encryption key is created on your device and is never transmitted to SealedBrief or written into any file the app controls. The licence is an Ed25519-signed file that is verified offline, so activation keeps working for the rest of your term even without the vendor. Because the document engine is a separate process, a per-process network monitor can attribute each connection to the right part of the app, and the document engine shows no external connections during indexing and Q&A. The Presentation Plane’s network traffic does not grow when your document volume grows, which rules out bulk exfiltration.

What the Personal tier is licensed for

SealedBrief is not certified evidence-management software for any jurisdiction’s chain-of-custody rules.

SealedBrief ships today for Linux as an AppImage and for macOS on Apple Silicon as a signed, notarized build. Windows is on a waitlist, blocked on an encryption-library dependency, and you are not charged until it ships. The Personal tier is licensed for your own personal, non-commercial use; paid client work requires the Professional tier’s commercial-use grant. Year one includes updates and support in the purchase price, and an annual support fee applies in years two and three of the term.

What every purchase is backed by

You can confirm the no-egress behaviour yourself with a packet capture on your own machine. The free 14-day trial is the full product and needs no account and no card.

With an outbound-connection firewall running, the process that reads your documents shows no connection attempts, because it makes none. Run strings over a SealedBrief core.db and you find no readable document text and no file paths — only high-entropy noise. Starting the free trial makes no network call. Every purchase is backed by a 30-day refund, separate from the free trial.

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This article was drafted with AI assistance.