Optional Accounts with Encrypted Vault

Dobisplit has never required an account. Create a group, share the link, done. We liked that simplicity, and we're keeping it.

But a lot of you wanted to open your groups from multiple devices without managing a long URL. So we added optional accounts. The design is borrowed directly from password managers like Bitwarden and 1Password. They've already worked out how to store secrets without being able to read them, and we saw no reason to reinvent it.

Your password never touches our server

When you register, your browser takes your password and email and uses them to derive a vault key locally. Same approach Bitwarden uses: a slow key derivation function that makes the result practically impossible to reverse from the outside. The vault key stays in your browser. We never see it.

When you save a group to your account, the group's encryption key gets locked with that vault key before anything leaves your device. What reaches our server is just ciphertext — random-looking bytes we have no way to read.

Login works slightly differently. Your browser derives a separate value from your password (distinct from the vault key) and sends that. We store only a one-way hash of it. If our database were compromised tomorrow, your group data would still be protected.

The honest bit: there is no password reset

This is the trade-off the model asks you to accept, and we want to be straight about it.

We don't hold your vault key. We physically cannot recover it. Forget your password, and the vault entries are gone. Your groups themselves aren't. They stay accessible via their share links, which are completely independent of your account. But the saved vault references go with it, and you'd re-add those groups from scratch.

A password reset would require us to keep a recovery key somewhere, which means someone could use it to unlock your vault. That someone might not be us. We'd rather be the service that genuinely can't help than the one that secretly can.

Still optional

You don't need an account. Nothing about the share-link flow has changed. If you want to try it out, the login button is in the top right.