Horcrux
Store your secrets with people you trust.
Horcrux backs up sensitive data like keys, passwords, and inheritance plans to the devices of people you know. Recovery requires their consent. It's more secure than the cloud, more resilient than paper.
The missing social layer in your security stack
Relying on other people is one of the most human things we can do, but too often our digital systems sideline the social. Horcrux marries advanced cryptography with real human relationships to protect against a wide variety of failure modes that encryption and traditional backup software never can.
What it's for
Your digital identity
Your Bluesky account, 2FA backup codes, a company encryption key — lose these and there's no recovery form to fill out. Back it up to a vault held by stewards you choose, so losing a device doesn't mean losing the identity.
Your homelab
Backup encryption keys, root passwords, hard drive encryption codes — the credentials that only you have, that unlock everything else. Store them with people you trust instead of one drive, one note, one point of failure.
Your digital will
Your safe's combination, password manager access, instructions your family would need if you're gone. Set a threshold your stewards can meet together — but no one of them can act alone.
How it works
Setup
Your secret is locked in an encrypted vault that requires multiple keys to open. Invite other people to download Horcrux and become a steward of your vault.
Distribute
Each steward receives a key to the vault for safekeeping until recovery time.
Recover
When you or a steward initiate recovery everyone receives a key request on their device. If enough stewards agree to share their keys with the initiator the vault can be opened.
Why Horcrux
Open source
An app that handles your most sensitive secrets shouldn't ask you to trust it blindly. Horcrux is part of the internet commons, MIT-licensed, and fully auditable.
Read the code →You are the customer
Horcrux is generously funded by a grant from OpenSats, not venture capital. There's no growth target, no ad model, and no acquisition to sell you out to. Our incentive is building something that actually protects you.
Built on durable, standards-based tech
Horcrux is designed to outlive its creators and users. For this we use simple and widely adopted technology - websockets, JSON, secp256k1, Chacha20. Horcrux runs on the open Nostr protocol and uses simple relay servers that are open source and self-hostable. The underlying tech is stable and boring on purpose, so Horcrux keeps working long after any one company would have shut it down.
Trust people. Not platforms.