How your confidential documents stay on your machine — and how you check it

Are you personally responsible for other people’s confidential information?

So where does your AI actually send those files?

Where do your documents go?

SealedBrief is a local-first desktop workspace for question-and-answer over your own confidential documents. SealedBrief’s Compute Plane runs with no network egress, so your documents and your questions stay on your machine. SealedBrief runs as two operating-system processes that cannot swap roles: a Compute Plane that handles your documents and a Presentation Plane that handles the network. The Compute Plane is the one process that reads your files, runs the model, retrieval and OCR, and holds your decrypted text. The process that reads your documents does not touch the network, and the process that does touch the network does not transmit your document content.

Then what touches the network?

The Presentation Plane makes two kinds of network call: a licence check and an opt-in update check. Licence activation and heartbeat requests go to licenses.sealedbrief.com over a TLS-pinned connection and carry no document or query text. The update check is opt-in and off by default; it fetches a signed manifest from sealedbrief-updates.s3.amazonaws.com and sends no body. Neither the licence check nor the update check carries your documents or your queries. The Presentation Plane’s network traffic does not grow when your document volume grows, which rules out bulk exfiltration.

Do you have to trust that?

You can confirm the no-egress behaviour yourself with a packet capture on your own machine. A runtime guard in the Compute Plane raises a hard error on any non-loopback connection or external DNS lookup.

What sits on your disk?

At rest, SealedBrief stores your extracted text and metadata as ciphertext on your device. 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 encryption master key is held in your operating-system keychain, not inside the vault, and per-record subkeys are derived from it on your device. Embedding vectors are stored unencrypted because approximate-nearest-neighbour search runs as plaintext math; the associated text and metadata are encrypted.

What are the honest limits?

SealedBrief runs a local open model rather than a frontier cloud model, so you should read and verify the citations. When the model cannot ground an answer in your documents, it signals that it could not ground the answer instead of inventing a citation. CPU-only operation works but is meaningfully slower than running on a GPU or on Apple Silicon. Windows is on a waitlist, blocked on an encryption-library dependency, and you are not charged until it ships.

How do you try it?

The free 14-day trial is the full product and needs no account and no card. Starting the free trial makes no network call. If the term lapses, the vault opens read-only and nothing is deleted. Every purchase is backed by a 30-day refund, separate from the free trial.