Privacy and security

What stays on this computer

Hosts, settings, known hosts, rules and the audit log are in a local database; secrets are in the encrypted vault. Shellvane sends nothing anywhere except the connections you open, the update check (once a day unless you turn it off, a download of the signed release manifest from the project's public GitHub releases that tells only Shellvane's version and your system, such as Shellvane/1.2.0 (darwin/arm64), and nothing about you; see Updates) and, if you set it up, the encrypted files sent to your sync folder, WebDAV server, Git repository or S3 bucket. Telnet is not encrypted: use it only on networks you trust. An exported group never holds keys, passwords or notes.

Confirmations

Shellvane asks before: trusting a new host key (and refuses a changed one), every signature with a forwarded agent, dangerous snippets in broadcast, deleting hosts, groups, keys and rules.

Automation limits

Automatic responses are opt-in per group or host, rate-limited, off in broadcast and audited. See Automation.

Commands you configure

Password, certificate, ProxyCommand and before-connecting commands run on this computer with your permissions; only use commands you trust.

Diagnostics and support bundle

When a connection fails, Connection details on the pane shows each step of the handshake: the address reached, the server's version, the negotiated algorithms (key exchange, host key, cipher, MAC), the host key's fingerprint, the authentication methods the server allows and those that failed, and the exact error. Settings → Diagnostics lists the last 50 attempts since Shellvane started.

Copy report copies an attempt as text for a colleague or a bug report, with host names, users and addresses replaced by pseudonyms (host-01, user-01, 10.255.0.x).

The support bundle is a ZIP file with the version and system, your settings, the structure of groups and hosts, and the recent connection attempts. Before saving, Preview shows every file exactly as it will be written. The same pseudonyms are used in all files, so they stay correlated; the table of correspondences is never saved. The vault, private keys, passwords, TOTP seeds, notes and commands (password, certificate, proxy, before-connecting and startup commands) are never included: settings that may hold them only say "(set)". The bundle is saved in the application's folder and sent nowhere.