What works offline

Worth being exact about, because “works offline” is the kind of claim that is either precisely true or quietly misleading. Our own earlier landing page claimed it without qualification, which was wrong, so here is the actual answer.

Works with no network

Unlocking, on a device you’ve used before. Zero server calls. Your master password and the locally cached account keys are all it needs.

Everything the vault already holds about trust. Your public-key pins and sync version markers are on disk, so verification decisions don’t depend on being able to reach us.

Reading the recovery backup blob. A copy lives in your local file, so it isn’t hostage to our availability.

Needs the network

Reading any secret. This is the important one: no environment payload is ever stored on your disk. The local file holds pins, version markers, and your encrypted account keys — and nothing else. Not the encrypted payload, not a cached copy, nothing. So pulling an environment requires reaching the server.

cendarum run. It pulls the environment first, which means it needs the network. Values already injected into a running process obviously keep working — that process owns them now — but starting a new one does not work offline.

Signing in on a new device, since the account keys have to be fetched.

Both recovery paths, which need a one-time code delivered by email.

Anything involving other people: invitations, grants, rotation, the roster.

So, accurately

Unlocking works offline — zero server calls. Reading secrets does not: environments are pulled from the server, and nothing decrypted is ever cached on disk.

That’s the sentence, and it’s the one on the home page.

Why no offline cache

It would be straightforward to encrypt a copy of each environment locally and read it with the network down. We haven’t, and the reason is that it changes what a stolen laptop means.

Today, a stolen locked machine yields metadata: which environments exist, which user IDs you’ve verified, some counters. Every value is somewhere else. With a local payload cache, that same machine holds every secret you have access to, encrypted under a key derived from your master password — which moves the entire security question onto how good that password is and how patient the attacker is.

That may still be the right trade for people who work on planes, and it is a reasonable thing to want. It is a deliberate decision rather than an omission, and if early-access users tell us the offline gap is the thing that stops them using it, that is exactly the sort of finding this stage of the product exists to surface.