Local file encryption. No accounts. No internet. No compromise.
AES-256-GCM-SIV · Argon2id · HKDF-SHA512 · 100% Safe Rust
You have files you don't want anyone to see. Tax returns. Medical records. Source code. Photos.
Neuron Encrypt encrypts them on your device — no cloud, no account, no phone-home. Your passphrase never leaves your machine, and the encrypted .vx2 file is useless to anyone without it.
| 🔒 Nonce-misuse resistant | AES-256-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) stays secure even if a nonce is ever reused |
| 🧠 Memory-hard KDF | Argon2id at 256 MiB makes GPU brute-force prohibitively expensive |
| 🛡️ Authenticated header | V4 authenticates the full header as AAD on every chunk, not just the body |
| ⚡ Streams any size | 1 KB or 1 TB at a constant ~258 MB RAM (4 PiB maximum) |
| 🧽 Metadata scrubbing | Strips EXIF/GPS, XMP, ID3 and document properties from 18 file formats |
| 🌍 4 platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux, Android 7.0+ — one Rust codebase |
| 🔇 Offline-first | Zero network permissions, zero telemetry, zero tracking |
| 📦 Atomic writes | Output goes to .tmp first, then renames — no partial files on crash |
| 🧹 Memory hygiene | Every key and plaintext buffer is Zeroizing<T>, wiped on drop |
Four more scrub formats — 18 in total. Metadata removal now covers AAC, M4A, Opus, AIFF and 3GP/3G2. Raw AAC was previously misdetected as MP3 and could not be scrubbed at all; 3GP worked but was written out with a .mp4 extension.
Three corruption bugs fixed. A PNG truncated on a chunk boundary was reported as successfully scrubbed, and scrub --in-place would replace the original with a header-only stub containing no image data. WebP and GIF had the same flaw. All three now fail closed and leave the source untouched.
Android notification fixed. An ongoing notification could survive a finished operation and could not be swiped away — it persisted until the app was force-stopped from Settings.
Also: the webbrowser 1.2.1 advisory (RUSTSEC-2026-0257), an in-app list of supported formats, a Linux AppImage, and a CI quality gate that runs fmt, clippy -D warnings, tests and cargo audit on every push.
Tests: 86/86 pass, including 14 adversarial tests that truncate every supported container byte-by-byte and assert the source is never modified.
Full history in CHANGELOG.md · 2.3.0 release notes
No account required — everything ships through GitLab's package registry.
| Platform | What you get | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 🐧 Linux | AppImage (no package manager) or .tar.gz with GUI + CLI |
Releases |
| 🪟 Windows | .zip with GUI + CLI |
Releases |
| 🍎 macOS | CLI only — Intel binary, see macOS below | Releases |
Prebuilt binaries, no Rust toolchain required:
| Platform | Binary |
|---|---|
| 🐧 Linux | neuron-encrypt-cli-2.3.0-linux-x86_64 |
| 🪟 Windows | neuron-encrypt-cli-2.3.0-windows-x86_64.exe |
| 🍎 macOS | neuron-encrypt-cli-2.3.0-macos-x86_64 |
Linux / macOS — one line, verifies SHA-256 and installs to your PATH:
curl -fsSL https://theredhacker0345.gitlab.io/neuron-encrypt/install.sh | shWindows (PowerShell) — verifies, installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\NeuronEncrypt\bin, updates your User PATH:
irm https://theredhacker0345.gitlab.io/neuron-encrypt/install.ps1 | iexManual install (Linux)
VERSION=2.3.0
CLI="neuron-encrypt-cli-${VERSION}-linux-x86_64"
BASE="https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/84892701/packages/generic/neuron-encrypt-cli/${VERSION}"
curl -fL "${BASE}/${CLI}" -o "$CLI"
curl -fL "${BASE}/SHA256SUMS-cli-linux.txt" -o SHA256SUMS-cli-linux.txt
sha256sum --check SHA256SUMS-cli-linux.txt
chmod +x "$CLI"
install -Dm755 "$CLI" "$HOME/.local/bin/neuron-encrypt-cli"Install from source (needs a Rust toolchain)
cargo install works against crates.io, which is independent of any GitHub account. The published version lags the GitLab releases, so for the current version build from the repository:
git clone https://gitlab.com/theredhacker0345/neuron-encrypt.git
cd neuron-encrypt/neuron-encrypt
cargo build --release --locked --bin neuron-encrypt --bin neuron-encrypt-cli-p neuron-encrypt-cli selects just the CLI; the repository root is a workspace containing both binaries.
The CLI is published for macOS. The desktop GUI is not.
The CLI binary is cross-compiled from Linux with osxcross against the macOS 13.3 SDK. This works because the GUI stack is behind an optional gui feature — building with --no-default-features --features metadata yields a CLI that links no AppKit, Metal or CoreFoundation frameworks, so it cross-links from Linux cleanly.
# Apple Silicon and Intel alike; falls back to x86_64 under Rosetta 2.
curl -fsSL https://theredhacker0345.gitlab.io/neuron-encrypt/install.sh | sh
neuron-encrypt-cli --versionWhy there is no .app: the GUI is eframe/winit, which on macOS links against AppKit and Metal. A binary linked that way on Linux cannot be codesigned or notarised, and cannot be tested on real hardware from a Linux runner — so shipping one would mean handing you a file that Gatekeeper is likely to reject and that nobody has run. We would rather publish nothing than publish something we cannot stand behind.
To build the GUI on a Mac:
git clone https://gitlab.com/theredhacker0345/neuron-encrypt.git
cd neuron-encrypt/neuron-encrypt
cargo build --release --bin neuron-encrypt
./target/release/neuron-encryptAn unsigned build runs locally; distribute it to other machines only after signing and notarising with your own Apple Developer ID.
Apple Silicon runs the published x86_64 CLI under Rosetta 2. If Rosetta is not installed,
softwareupdate --install-rosettaenables it. A nativeaarch64-apple-darwinbuild needs the osxcross toolchain to be extended for that target and is not published yet.
APK for Android 7.0+ from GitLab releases, or via F-Droid. A signed build and an unsigned F-Droid build are both attached to each release.
Always verify the SHA-256 hash published beside each download.
| Home | Configure | Processing | Success |
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| Home | Picker | Success | About |
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./neuron-encryptDrop a file (or click Browse — encrypt vs decrypt is auto-detected from magic bytes), enter a passphrase, click Encrypt. The original is left untouched; wiping it afterwards is opt-in and confirmed.
# Encrypt (prompts for the passphrase)
neuron-encrypt-cli encrypt -i secret.pdf
# Decrypt
neuron-encrypt-cli decrypt -i secret.pdf.vx2
# Encrypt over SSH
neuron-encrypt-cli encrypt -i backup.tar.gz -o - | ssh user@host 'cat > backup.vx2'
# Machine-readable output for CI
neuron-encrypt-cli encrypt -i artifact.zip --json --password-file ./key
# Strip metadata -> writes photo.clean.jpg beside the original
neuron-encrypt-cli scrub -i photo.jpg
# Replace in place instead
neuron-encrypt-cli scrub -i video.mp4 --in-placeYour passphrase is held in memory only long enough to derive the key via Argon2id, then zeroed. It is never written to disk, never sent over the network, never logged.
Strips the metadata that leaks who, where and when — without touching the file's contents.
| Family | Formats | What gets removed |
|---|---|---|
| Images | JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, BMP | EXIF + GPS, XMP, IPTC, Photoshop blocks, ICC profiles, comments, timestamps |
| Documents | PDF, Office (docx/xlsx/pptx) |
Author/title/dates, XMP streams, docProps/*, embedded thumbnails |
| Audio | MP3, AAC, M4A, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, AIFF | ID3v1/v2, APE tags, iTunes ilst, Vorbis comments, RIFF INFO, IFF text chunks |
| Video | MP4, MOV, 3GP, 3G2 | iTunes ilst atoms, GPS, device and encoder tags |
Fail closed. A scrubber that does not fully understand a structure aborts with an explicit error rather than emitting a possibly-broken file, and every output is re-validated before it replaces anything. Unknown formats, plain ZIPs, archives and camera RAW are rejected. HEIC/HEIF is detected but deliberately not rewritten — its GPS and device data live in structures whose offsets point into the media payload, and guessing risks corrupting the photo.
Other guarantees:
- Cleaned copy by default —
<name>.clean.<ext>is written atomically beside the original. In-place replacement and post-copy secure wipe are opt-in. - Payload integrity — retained chunks are copied byte-for-byte, so decoders see identical data.
- Bounded memory on mobile — the Android engine stages files through app-private storage with a fixed 1 MiB buffer. Formats that must be parsed whole are capped at 64 MiB on Android (1 GiB on desktop) and report "too large to scrub" rather than being killed.
| Layer | Algorithm | Parameters |
|---|---|---|
| Encryption | AES-256-GCM-SIV (RFC 8452) | BE32 streaming, 1 MiB chunks, per-chunk auth tag |
| Key derivation | Argon2id (RFC 9106) | m=256 MiB, t=3, p=4, 64-byte output |
| Key expansion | HKDF-SHA512 (RFC 5869) | Per-version domain separation (V2/V3/V4) |
| Randomness | OsRng (OS CSPRNG) | Fresh salt + nonce per file, never reused |
| Memory hygiene | Zeroizing<T> |
Keys + plaintext wiped from RAM on drop |
| File format | VAULTX04 | Header authenticated as AAD on every chunk |
Protected against: offline brute-force, ciphertext tampering, header tampering, nonce reuse, truncation/reordering/substitution, and plaintext lingering in RAM.
Not protected against: cold-boot and DMA attacks, keyloggers and screen recorders, SSD wear-leveling (secure wipe is best-effort on flash), weak passphrases (the strength meter is advisory), and metadata leakage — filenames, sizes and timestamps stay visible.
Full audit: 44 findings, 0 critical, 0 high, 9 medium (all fixed). See SECURITY_AUDIT.md.
Found a vulnerability? Do not open a public issue — use a GitLab confidential issue.
Can I recover my files if I forget the passphrase?
No. There is no backdoor, no recovery key, no master password. This is by design — a backdoor that lets you in also lets an attacker in.
Is my passphrase stored anywhere?
No. It is held in memory only long enough to derive the key via Argon2id, then zeroed. Never written to disk, never sent over the network, never logged.
What is the difference between V2, V3 and V4?
- V2 (VAULTX02) — legacy, entire file in RAM, ≤1 GiB
- V3 (VAULTX03) — streaming, 1 MiB chunks, no size limit, header not authenticated
- V4 (VAULTX04) — current default: same as V3, but the header is authenticated as AAD on every chunk
All three are readable by v2.1+. New encryptions use V4. There is no auto-migration — re-encrypt to upgrade.
How does this compare to VeraCrypt / Cryptomator / 7-Zip?
| Feature | Neuron Encrypt | VeraCrypt | Cryptomator | 7-Zip AES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | File-level | Volume/container | Cloud-file | File-level |
| Cipher | AES-256-GCM-SIV | AES-256-XTS | AES-256-GCM | AES-256 |
| Nonce-misuse resistant | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| KDF | Argon2id 256 MiB | PBKDF2 | PBKDF2 | PBKDF2 |
| Authenticated header | ✅ (V4) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Memory-hard KDF | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| RAM usage | ~258 MB | Varies | Low | Low |
| Max file size | 4 PiB | 16 EiB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Metadata scrubbing | ✅ 18 formats | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Open source | ✅ GPLv3 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Is macOS supported?
The CLI is — an Intel binary, cross-compiled and published with every release, installable with the same one-liner as Linux. Apple Silicon runs it under Rosetta 2.
The GUI is not, and we are not shipping an unverifiable one. The desktop app links against AppKit and Metal, so a binary cross-linked from a Linux runner can be neither codesigned, nor notarised, nor tested on real hardware — and an unsigned .app is something Gatekeeper usually refuses. Build it yourself from source on your Mac if you want the windowed app; the exact command is in macOS.
Why is the Windows build not code-signed?
Authenticode certificates cost $200–400/year. Until one is available, SmartScreen will warn on first run — click "Run anyway", and verify the SHA-256 hash published with the download.
What are the CLI limitations?
- No stdin encrypt / scrub — both need seeking, so piped input is decrypt-only
- Fixed Argon2id parameters — no
--memory-cost/--time-costflags, by design - No batch or glob mode — single file per invocation; loop with
find -exec(the GUI and Android app do support batch) - No
--dry-run
Can I install the CLI from crates.io?
Yes, cargo install neuron-encrypt-cli works and needs no account. Note the published version lags the GitLab releases — check the badge at the top for the current one.
git clone https://gitlab.com/theredhacker0345/neuron-encrypt.git
cd neuron-encrypt/neuron-encrypt
rustup component add rustfmt clippy
cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --lib --releaseThe same three commands run as a CI quality gate on every push. Pipeline details are in docs/CI_CD.md.
| Path | |
|---|---|
neuron-encrypt/src/crypto.rs |
AES-256-GCM-SIV, Argon2id, V2/V3/V4 formats |
neuron-encrypt/src/metadata/ |
Metadata scrubbing, one module per family |
neuron-encrypt/src/metadata/brutal.rs |
Adversarial tests (truncation sweep, hostile inputs) |
neuron-encrypt/src/gui.rs |
egui desktop GUI |
neuron-encrypt/src/bin/cli.rs |
CLI binary |
android/ |
Kotlin app + Rust JNI bridge |
.gitlab/ci/ |
Per-platform child pipelines |
GPLv3 — Copyright (c) 2024–2026 Ubaid ur Rehman. See LICENSE.