How Vaults encrypted chats work

Vaults chats are real-time private group chat rooms living on a separate Chats page in the dashboard at vaults.lol/dashboard/chats. They are NOT shown on user profiles, your vaults.lol/username page has no live chat box. You create a room, get a random 6 character key like ABC-123, and share that key with anyone you want to talk to. The room is invite only, ephemeral, and runs directly between browsers.

Chats are a Premium feature. You need a Vaults account on Lifetime (€5 one time) or Supporter (€9.99) to create or join encrypted rooms. Free accounts do not have access to chats.

Messages, typing indicators, replies, reactions and file transfers travel directly between participants over WebRTC, browser to browser. WebRTC uses DTLS/SRTP end-to-end encryption between the peers in the room. The encryption keys are held by the browsers, not by Vaults. Our server is only used to introduce two browsers to each other so they can connect (this is called WebRTC signalling). Once connected, chat contents never flow through, or land in, our database.

Yes. WebRTC DTLS/SRTP is end-to-end encrypted between the browsers in the room, and Vaults servers never receive or store message contents, files, replies or reactions. In practice this behaves like a private, ephemeral, end-to-end encrypted chat between the people in the room. If you need a hardened threat model beyond what a peer to peer web chat provides, use a dedicated messenger like Signal on top.

Only people with the room key AND a Premium Vaults account. Rooms are not listed publicly anywhere and the keys are random.

You can share files up to 50 MB inside a room. Files transfer peer to peer like messages. They are not uploaded to Vaults storage.

Private rooms still have rules. Vaults chats cannot be used for illegal content, harassment, scams, malware, threats or abuse. Privacy is there for normal users, not for breaking the law or harming people.