The first question everyone asks, and it deserves better than trust us. So here is the design, what happens when a phone is stolen, the part where you can genuinely lose everything, and the list of things we have not done yet.
Our servers can be attacked like anyone's. What is inside: a list of public keys, the Shelf and mail encrypted with keys we hold, and a Vault sealed with keys we do not. No passwords, no card numbers, no vault keys. The Vault stays sealed even if we lose the box.
You revoke it, from any browser on earth, in about a minute. It stops being you. The thief cannot spend, cannot become you, cannot lock you out.
Your recovery cards bring you back: slowly and loudly, on purpose. Lose the cards too and we cannot help you. We would rather tell you that here than pretend.
This page describes the security design Liir is built to. The identity and storage layers are running; the recovery machinery described below is being built to this exact specification, published so it can be argued with. No third-party security audit has happened yet. That is on the list at the bottom, where we keep the honest part.
Every company you have ever trusted with a password made the same promise: we will guard the secret. Every breach you have read about is that promise breaking.
We made a different promise: we will not hold the secret at all.
What Liir's servers hold for your identity is a list: which public keys belong to which mark, which have been revoked, what is pending. Your private keys never leave your hardware. Your recovery cards never reach us. Two of them rebuild the key in your own browser, and the math for that has a name, and it is not new. Your vault is encrypted before it leaves your device, with a key we never see. The Shelf and mail are the exception, said plainly below.
So the honest sentence about a breach is not it cannot happen. It is:
We can lose our servers.
We cannot lose you.
There is no database of secrets here, and you cannot leak what you never held.
Your Vault. We hold your sealed files as scrambled bytes we cannot read. But a breach would hand an attacker those bytes to work on offline, forever, and the only wall standing is the key. So we built for that day. The Vault key is a random 256-bit key. It is wrapped under your passkey for the daily open, and under a guard rebuilt from any two of your three recovery cards for recovery. That guard is picked by chance, never chosen by taste, so there is nothing to guess and nothing to work out in advance. Every wrap carries its own random salt. The sealed format carries a version number, so the day a stronger recipe is warranted, your files move to it instead of being stuck.
Make the cards when the ceremony asks: print them, or save the three images. Keep two of them apart. That is the wall.
Your Shelf files and hosted mail are encrypted on our disks too, but with a key we hold, because that is what lets the Shelf serve, share, and someday search. So the honest sentence there is different. A stolen drive gives an attacker ciphertext without its key, and we still investigate and say what was reachable. A compromised server can read the Shelf and mail, and cannot read the Vault. Put what must stay sealed in the Vault; that is what it is for.
If we hold nothing, then you hold everything, and the risk moves from a thousand companies you will never audit onto things you actually control:
Most of what makes this safe is one rule: how fast an operation is depends on which way it points. Taking power away is instant. Using power needs you, live. Changing what power is takes ten days and screams the whole time.
Why that shape? Because revoking can only ever protect you, so it should be the easiest thing in the system. And because everything an attacker actually wants (a new device enrolled, your cards replaced, your vault erased) is exactly the kind of change that should be impossible to do quietly. Even for you. Especially for you, since anyone who can do it quickly to you can be tricked or forced into doing it quickly for someone else.
Not a hypothetical. The design was tested against exactly this: an unlocked phone, no screen lock, signed in, gone.
You, minute one. Any browser. liir.net. Two cards. Revoke everything. The phone stops being you before the thief has left the parking lot.
The thief, meanwhile, can read what was open on the screen and anything you had left unlocked. That window is real and we will not pretend otherwise. Here is what a thief cannot do, no matter how long they hold the phone:
Everything a thief can do is a snapshot. Nothing a thief can do is a takeover.
And on your new phone: two cards get you reading your own things within minutes, small payments within a day, and full authority after the waiting period, which nothing objects to, because you already revoked the only device that could have.
House fire. The bag with the phone and the laptop in it. Total loss is rare, and it is the case that decides whether a system like this is honest.
Two of your cards start recovery from any device on earth. What they start is deliberately slow: reading your own data comes back in minutes. The power to move real money or change who counts as you comes back over days. And the entire time, every device ever enrolled is being told, loudly, with a one-tap cancel. Someone who stole your cards does not get a skeleton key. They get a ten-day countdown pointed at every screen you own.
And then the floor, which we state instead of burying:
Not as a punishment. As arithmetic. Any back door that could rescue you in that state is a door someone else can walk through: a system with no unrecoverable state is a system where a stranger can always get in. Every company that promises otherwise is holding a copy of you, and a copy of you is a thing that can be stolen.
So: make the cards once, printed or saved as images. Keep them somewhere that does not travel with your phone, and keep two of the three apart. That single act is nearly all of the homework there is.
This is also, plainly, what Liir Cloud is for. Most people own one device, and one device is one bag away from total loss. Cloud is the second anchor: an encrypted copy we cannot read, on hardware that does not burn down with your house, with the recovery clock running somewhere a thief cannot reach. It is not more storage. It is how you come back.
They get a window display. A signed-in session can look. It cannot spend, cannot open the vault, cannot change anything about who you are, because none of those run on a session. Each one round-trips to your face or your cards at the moment it happens. The most common theft on the web buys the least here.
The honest limit. Malware cannot copy your key off secure hardware, but while it is on your machine it can try to use what you unlock. This is why approvals are designed to be read (one merchant, one amount, on the screen) and why the things that matter most sit behind the vault, which stays sealed until you open it, each time.
They can take everything we have. For the Vault, what we have is a registry of public keys, sealed boxes we cannot open, and a wrapped key that only your own key or your cards can unwrap. We cannot be compelled to produce what we do not hold: that is not bravery, it is inventory. For the Shelf and hosted mail, we hold the key, and valid legal process can reach what is there; the privacy page says so in the same words. What a court can do is order us to stop serving you, which is why the local copy of your vault is yours and always will be: two of your recovery cards and copies of your sealed files open the vault anywhere, with us or without us. Our gatekeeping can slow an attacker down, and it can never strand you.
Cryptography does not solve someone standing over you, and we will not claim otherwise. What the design does: big changes take days and scream to every device, so coercion has to last ten days and stay quiet, which it rarely can. It is a mitigation, not a solution, and that is the most honest sentence available on this subject.
We do, and we will defend it. You can also keep the three cards as images instead. Either way the cards never touch our servers: printing goes through your machine and your printer, nothing of ours. Paper is the most tested key storage there is. It cannot be phished, it cannot be copied off over a network, and it survives every password reset ever invented. That is why banks mail PINs, and why the backup-code page of nearly every large company has a Print button on it today. What actually loses vaults is a shaking hand miscopying a secret. A card is never typed. It is read back by camera, or from the saved image or PDF, and one card alone says nothing. The print flow asks you first (are you somewhere private, is the printer yours) and the card itself repeats the warning. The people this serves do not post about security. They have a fireproof box and a grandchild. We built it for them.
You should not, yet. Belief is what the next section is for.
A security page that only lists strengths is an advertisement. Here is the other column, kept current on purpose.
Disclosed is strong. Discovered is fatal. We intend to stay in the first column.
We hold nothing worth stealing.
You hold everything,
and we built for the day you drop it.
Security that depends on
nobody making a mistake
is not
security.
Phones get stolen. Cards get lost. Houses burn down. The design assumes all of it, and the worst day still ends with you, still you.
or start with why this exists · it is free on your own hardware
These are the standards the design leans on, named so the claims can be checked rather than trusted. The missing citation is the one we owe you: a third-party security audit. It has not happened yet, and this page says so above.
Keep reading: Why this exists · What it does to scams · The notary · we can prove when