How Privora Protects Your Files: Encryption, Keys and Limits

A plain-language description of how Privora protects your files – and, just as important, what it does not protect against.

What Privora encrypts

Every photo, video, document and note in the vault, plus thumbnails, file names, dates and album names.
Content is encrypted with AES-256-GCM in 1 MiB segments, so videos play straight from the encrypted file.
The index Privora keeps on the phone holds no names, types, dates or sizes in plain text.

The vault has one random master key. Your password does not encrypt files directly: it unlocks that key.
Your password is stretched with Argon2id (64 MiB of memory, about one second per attempt), which makes guessing slow.
A recovery key, shown once when you create the vault, can also unlock it. We never see either – so we cannot reset them.
Fingerprint and pattern unlock are shortcuts bound to this phone's secure hardware; the password is still needed after a restart and at least every 72 hours for the pattern.

The vault lives in Privora's private app storage and is never uploaded. Android's automatic backup is switched off for it.
Privora uses the internet only to verify Privora Pro purchases with Google Play and our billing server. Vault content, names, thumbnails, passwords, keys and unlock attempts are never sent.
No account, no ads, no analytics, no crash reporting.

Backups are one encrypted file that opens with your password or recovery key. Every copy is read back and test-decrypted after writing.
You decide where backups go: an SD card, a USB stick, your own cloud folder or another phone via Quick Share.

A phone that is rooted, infected with malware or otherwise compromised.
Copies that already exist elsewhere: the gallery's trash, Google Photos or another cloud, messaging apps, old phone backups.
Someone filming the screen, or watching while the vault is open.
A weak password. Encryption cannot add strength to a short PIN; it can only make guessing slower.
Deleting a file from flash memory does not guarantee the bytes are physically gone.

Privora is built on standard, widely studied building blocks (AES-256-GCM, Argon2id, HKDF, Google Tink), and we test it ourselves – but its design has not yet been independently audited. We will say so until it has been.