Topic
engineering
5 stories about engineering—and the choices behind the technology we make.
← Back to all storiesWhat it means to let an agent hold your passwords
iOS 27 ships this month with a Passwords app that signs into your accounts and fixes weak or reused passwords on its own. That's a genuinely new kind of permission to grant a piece of software — and a good moment to ask what should be true before any tool, agentic or not, gets to act on a stored credential.
What the Credential Exchange Protocol actually fixes
Passwords could always leave a password manager as a plaintext file. Passkeys can't — there's no string to copy. That gap is why Apple, Google, Microsoft and the major password managers agreed on the Credential Exchange Protocol, and it's a useful lens for what any manager's "export" actually promises you.
What happens when a password manager's servers go down
Your vault being encrypted and your vault being reachable are two different promises. A short login incident this week is a clean way to see why, and what to check about the tool you use
The Vauz signing key: check your download is genuine
Every Vauz release is signed with the same minisign key. Here it is, with the three commands that check a download — and why one copy of a key proves nothing.
How Vauz keeps your secrets local
On-device design changes more than storage—it changes who has to earn your trust.