Kinship Vault

The problem Important documents (passports, national IDs, driver's licenses, health cards, insurance policies, tax returns, wills, vaccination records, vehicle titles, property deeds) live in three bad places today. 1. A desk drawer, where they cannot be searched, cannot travel with you, and cannot be reached by anyone else if something happens to you. 2. The phone's camera roll, where any app with photo access can read them and where cloud photo sync silently uploads them to a vendor that holds the keys. 3. A general-purpose cloud drive, where the provider can decrypt your files on demand and where your spouse, lawyer, or executor has no practical way in if you are incapacitated. The result is the same in every direction. People cannot find documents when bureaucracy demands them. Travelers cannot prove identity after a lost wallet. Medical responders cannot find a blood type or allergy list on a locked phone. And when someone dies, their family is left guessing at passwords and ransacking filing cabinets. KinshipVault solves this with a vault that lives entirely on your phone, recognises documents intelligently, reminds you when they expire, and can be recovered by people you trust without any company sitting in the middle. How it works Capture and recognition. Photograph a document with the camera and on-device text recognition extracts the contents. A library of more than a hundred document schemas (Canadian passport, Pakistan CNIC, Ontario Health Card, US 1040, EU Pet Passport, the Hague Apostille, and many others across many countries) identifies the document type and pulls structured fields, validating check digits where the format supports it (Luhn, Verhoeff). Nothing leaves the device during scanning. Storage. Every document is encrypted with its own AES-256-GCM key, derived via HKDF-SHA-256 from a 256-bit master key. The master key is generated on the device, wrapped by a Secure Enclave keypair, and released only by Face ID or Touch ID. Metadata sits in a SQLCipher-encrypted database. A tamper-evident, hash-chained audit ledger records every read and write. Daily use. Documents with expiry dates trigger reminders at 90, 30, 7, and 1 days out. An emergency profile (blood type, allergies, ICE contacts, travel-document reference) is accessible without biometric unlock so first responders can read it from a locked phone. A Lock-Screen widget mirrors a small subset of fields for quick glance. Recovery, three ways. - A 24-word BIP39 passphrase for solo recovery, printed once and stored offline. - A Recovery Network built on Shamir Secret Sharing. The master key splits into 5 pieces of which any 3 reconstruct it, distributed to trusted contacts as QR codes, signed .kvshard files, or printable shard cards. No server, no vendor, no escrow. Any 2 pieces reveal nothing (information-theoretic, not merely computationally hard). - A Dead Man's Switch that releases a final piece to a designated trustee after a configurable period of account inactivity and grace period, in case the owner is incapacitated. Safety net. A panic mode triggered by a button or a duress PIN, plus optional automatic wipe after a configurable number of failed unlock attempts (default 10), ensures a coerced unlock attempt can fail safely. Cloud is optional and ciphertext-only. If turned on, backups sync to iCloud as opaque AES-GCM blobs sealed before they leave the app sandbox. The provider sees only ciphertext. The toggle is off by default. What makes it different - Schema-driven recognition for more than a hundred document types worldwide, not just generic OCR. - Three independent recovery paths covering solo, distributed-trust, and incapacitation scenarios. - A hardware-bound cryptographic root: no password serves as the master secret; the key is tied to the phone's Secure Enclave. - Real daily utility (expiry reminders, emergency profile, lock-screen widget), not only a doomsday vault. - Free tier for 3 ID documents; Pro tier available monthly, annual, or lifetime for unlimited storage and additional categories.