Vault & Crypto

Vault file

Single file at ~/.pushkey/vault.enc.

PK2\x00                 # 4-byte magic
<16 bytes>              # Argon2id salt
<12 bytes><ciphertext>  # nonce + AES-256-GCM body

The decrypted payload is a JSON dict:

{
  "OPENAI_API_KEY": {
    "value": "sk-...",
    "created": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
    "rotated": "2026-04-01T00:00:00Z",
    "provider": "openai",
    "env": "prod",
    "projects": ["/path/to/project"],
    "notes": ""
  }
}

Key derivation

Argon2id — time=3, memory=64 MB, parallelism=4.

Falls back to PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations if libargon2 is unavailable.

The derived key is 32 bytes and used directly as the AES-256-GCM key. It is never persisted.

Legacy V1 vaults

Older vaults use Fernet (AES-128-CBC), detected by the absence of the PK2\x00 magic. PushKey auto-detects and prompts for migration on load.

Audit log encryption

Log entries are individually encrypted using a deterministic key derived from the salt — no password required to decrypt logs, by design. This lets tooling verify the audit trail without requiring the master password.

Config and health files