Custodia

Nothing to find.

Custodia moves files, folders — even whole apps — into an AES-256 vault on your Mac. While it is locked, Finder, Spotlight and ls don't show them grayed out or marked private. They return no result at all.

Coming to the Mac App Store How the encryption works

PHP 499, paid once. Universal Purchase. Buy once, use on Mac and iPhone.

$ ls /Volumes/CustodiaVault

Client contracts Signal.app Tax 2025.pdf passports

$ mdfind -name "Tax 2025.pdf"

/Volumes/CustodiaVault/Tax 2025.pdf

$ ls ~/Library/Application Support/Custodia

vault.sparsebundle

Locking unmounts the volume. Finder, Spotlight and ls stop returning results because there is nothing left to return — only one opaque blob on disk.

Claims you can check rather than trust

Security software asks for an unusual amount of faith. These three are the ones you can verify without taking anyone's word for it.

No network entitlement
Custodia is built without the sandbox entitlement macOS requires to open a connection. Not "we promise not to" — the app has no route to the network to begin with.
No account, no telemetry
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to opt out of. No identifier, no crash reporter, no analytics. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected.
Apple's cryptography, not ours
AES-256 through hdiutil on macOS and CryptoKit on iOS. No hand-rolled crypto, and no third-party packages anywhere in either app.

Two platforms, two mechanisms

A Mac can mount an encrypted volume. An iPhone cannot, so the iOS vault encrypts every item on its own instead. Both end up at AES-256; the route there is different, and it is worth knowing which one is protecting you.

macOS

macOS 13 Ventura or later

One encrypted disk image, mounted while you work and unmounted the moment you lock.

  • The vault is a single AES-256 sparsebundle at ~/Library/Application Support/Custodia/vault.sparsebundle. It grows as you fill it, up to a 2 TB ceiling.
  • Unlocked, it mounts at /Volumes/CustodiaVault and stays out of the Finder sidebar. Locked, the only thing on disk is the opaque blob.
  • Your password reaches hdiutil over standard input — never as a command argument, where any other process could read it, and never written to disk.
  • The vault directory is excluded from Time Machine, so a backup can't quietly carry a second copy somewhere else.

iOS

in development

Per-item envelope encryption, so no single key is ever holding the whole library open.

  • Your password runs through PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, calibrated to about half a second on your device and never below 600,000 iterations.
  • That derives a key which wraps a random 256-bit vault key, which in turn wraps one separate key per photo, video and document. Deleting an item means dropping its key.
  • No password hash is stored anywhere. The authentication tag on the wrapped vault key is what proves the password was right.
  • Face ID is a convenience wrap of that key and not a way around it. Re-enroll a face or change the passcode and the wrap is invalidated — the app falls back to asking for the password.

What Custodia will not do

Every vault has edges. Knowing where they are is the difference between a tool you can rely on and one that surprises you at the worst moment.

A forgotten password ends it

There is no reset, no recovery key and no back door, because any of those would be a second way in. Lose the password and the contents are gone for good.

Auto-lock watches the app, not the volume

The idle timer tracks activity inside Custodia. Browsing the mounted vault in Finder does not reset it, so a long session in Finder can still lock underneath you.

Secure delete is best effort

On an SSD, wear leveling can leave traces of overwritten data beyond the reach of any application. For anything genuinely sensitive, run FileVault on the source disk as well.

Vaulting an app hides the app, not its traces

A vaulted application disappears from Finder and Spotlight. Preferences, caches and state it already wrote to ~/Library stay where they are — outside the vault.

Bought once, not rented

The vault runs entirely on your device. There is no server to keep running, so there is nothing to charge you rent for.

Everything described on this page stays yours. Nothing you have already bought will move behind a subscription later.

PHP 499

one-time purchase

  • Mac and iPhone on a single Universal Purchase
  • Every current and future local feature
  • No account, no subscription, no upsell
Coming to the Mac App Store