2026-07-25
What happens if you forget your file's passphrase? There's no recovery, by design
Every other password you've forgotten had a way back in: click "forgot password," get an email, pick a new one. A file encrypted with NearSeal doesn't have that option, in either of its two formats, and it never will. That's worth explaining honestly, because "no recovery" sounds like a missing feature right up until you understand why it's actually the whole point.
There's nothing to reset, because nothing was ever stored
A password reset works when some server somewhere holds a copy of your password, or a hash of it, or a way to issue you a new one. NearSeal never has that, because NearSeal never has a server in this part of the story at all. The encryption key for a file isn't chosen and saved anywhere — it's derived, on the fly, straight from the passphrase you type plus a random salt that's stored in the file itself. Get the passphrase right, and that derivation reproduces the exact key that unlocks the file. Get it wrong, and the AES-GCM authentication tag fails, the app throws a plain "wrong passphrase" error, and that's the entire signal you get — no "close, try again," no partial credit. The optional age format works the same way structurally, just with scrypt instead of PBKDF2 doing the derivation. Nobody, including NearSeal, ever had your passphrase to begin with. There's nothing for support to look up, because there was never a copy to look up.
No lockout means nobody is guarding the door for you
Some encrypted devices protect you from your own forgetfulness with an attempt limiter. A well-known real example: developer Stefan Thomas stored the keys to 7,002 bitcoin on an IronKey USB drive, and that drive wipes itself after ten wrong password tries — he'd used eight before he realized the paper he'd written the password on was gone, leaving him two guesses to save roughly nine figures. That's a genuinely different mechanism from what an encrypted file does, and it's worth being precise about the difference: NearSeal's output is just a file, not a device with firmware that can decide to erase itself. Anyone holding a copy of that file can try passphrases against it entirely offline, as many times as they want, forever, with nothing to trip and nothing to alert. That's true of essentially any offline file encryption, not a NearSeal-specific gap — but it means the passphrase itself is the entire wall. Nothing else is standing behind it.
What the built-in slowdown actually buys you
Since nothing rate-limits the guessing, the only defense left is making each individual guess expensive. NearSeal's default format runs the passphrase through PBKDF2-SHA256 at 220 iterations — 1,048,576 rounds — before it ever becomes an AES key, and every one of those rounds has to be repeated for every single guess an attacker makes. A 2025 GPU benchmark put a high-end consumer card at roughly 3.8 million PBKDF2-SHA256 guesses per second at 100,000 iterations; scaled up to NearSeal's roughly ten-times-higher iteration count, the same hardware lands somewhere around 360,000 guesses per second — an estimate from scaling that published number, not a direct measurement of this exact setup. That's still fast against a short or common passphrase, but it's a different world from an unstretched hash, and it's the reason the app enforces sane bounds on that iteration count during decryption too: a hostile file can't claim some absurd number and hang your browser trying to comply.
The strength meter already knows: length beats symbols
NearSeal's own passphrase-strength meter, the row of bars that fills in as you type, is built almost entirely around length: it scores length directly (one point per five characters, capped), and character variety — mixing cases, digits, symbols — only adds one extra point, and only once you've already used three different types of characters. That lean turns out to match current guidance rather than fight it: NIST's SP 800-63B (Revision 4) tells services to stop demanding mandatory complexity rules, recommends at least 15 characters for a password securing something on its own, and asks that longer inputs — up to 64 characters — be accepted so a genuine multi-word passphrase fits. A long, memorable sentence beats a short password with a symbol swapped in for a letter, both by that guidance and by NearSeal's own meter math.
What to actually do with all of this
Because the loss is permanent, the only real safeguard is writing the passphrase down somewhere durable before you need it, not after. A password manager works. So does a physical note kept somewhere separate from whatever device holds the encrypted file — not taped to it. Treat the passphrase as the only key to a safe, because functionally that's exactly what it is: no master key, no spare, no one to call. That's true whether you used NearSeal's default format or opted into the portable age format — both derive their key from the passphrase and nothing else, which is the same property that keeps the file safe from everyone who isn't you.