Security
What is encrypted, what leaves your Mac, what is never picked up at all, and where to tell us if we got something wrong.
What is encrypted, and with what key
Everything you save into a box, and everything in your history, is stored on your Mac in an encrypted database. Large items are written to disk as encrypted files rather than into the database, and they are encrypted the same way.
The key is generated on your Mac and stored in the macOS Keychain, marked so that it is available only while your Mac is unlocked and never leaves the device. It is not synced to iCloud and it is not included in a backup. If you restore a backup onto a different Mac, what you saved is unreadable there rather than readable.
We do not have a copy of that key and cannot produce one. There is no plaintext copy of your content anywhere in the database, including previews and labels.
Timestamps, item sizes, and the name of the app you copied from are stored unencrypted. Content never is.
What is never captured
Password managers mark what they put on the clipboard as concealed. Nine Boxes checks every clipboard change and skips those items entirely. They are never saved, never previewed, never written to disk, and never sent anywhere. The same applies to items marked transient or auto-generated.
Because that marking is voluntary, Preferences also lets you exclude specific apps by name. Nothing copied while an excluded app is in front is read or stored at all.
One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is a deliberate trade rather than a bug. When you paste from a box, Nine Boxes normally puts your previous clipboard back a fraction of a second later. If your clipboard held a password at that moment, Nine Boxes does not read it, even briefly, so the box’s content stays on your clipboard instead of the password being restored.
What leaves your Mac, when, and to whom
If you never turn on syncing and never use an AI feature, nothing you copy leaves your Mac.
Syncing is optional and off by default. When it is on, the contents of your boxes are encrypted on your Mac before they are uploaded. We store the encrypted bytes. We cannot read them, and neither can anyone who obtains them from us.
AI actions are the one place content does leave in readable form, so this is stated exactly rather than generally. When you explicitly trigger an AI action, the specific piece of content you selected is sent to Anthropic to be processed. It travels over an encrypted connection through our server, and it is readable while it is being processed. That is unavoidable: a model cannot process text it cannot read.
- Nothing is ever sent to AI automatically. Only when you press the button.
- Only the snippet you acted on is sent. Not your other boxes, not your history, not your files.
- We log that a request happened, its size, and what it cost. We do not log the content.
- Anthropic processes it under their commercial terms and does not use it to train their models.
We do not claim to be zero-knowledge, because that would not be true.
How the app itself is protected
Every release is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple before it is published. macOS checks both before it runs.
Code injection, unsigned libraries and debugger attachment are disabled.
Updates are verified against a key held offline before they are installed. An update we did not sign will not install.
The app never holds a key to anything that costs money. Every such call goes through our server, authenticated as you.
Holding Escape for three seconds stops Nine Boxes watching your keyboard, immediately, whatever else is happening.
One command in Preferences clears every box, all history, and every file on disk in under a second. There is no undo.
Reporting a vulnerability
Email chase@chaseyoursolutions.com. Tell us what you found and how to reproduce it. You do not need to prove impact first.
What we commit to:
- We acknowledge within two business days.
- We tell you whether we can reproduce it within five business days.
- We tell you when it is fixed, and we credit you in the release notes unless you would rather we did not.
We do not run a paid bug bounty. We will not threaten you for reporting something in good faith.
Please do not test against other people’s accounts or data, and please give us a chance to fix it before publishing.
For what we collect and how long we keep it, see the privacy policy and the list of subprocessors. For a data export or deletion, email chase@chaseyoursolutions.com.