Resetting your password

Your master password never leaves your machine. It derives the key that encrypts your hosts, identities and keys, and the key that opens the sealed bundle holding every vault key. What the server stores is ciphertext and a value that proves you know the password without revealing it.

That is the whole point of the design, and it has one unavoidable consequence: nobody at Termiyo can reset your password for you, because nobody at Termiyo can decrypt anything. A link that set a new password would give you an account you could sign in to, containing data you could never read again.

This page is about a lost password, which is the one nothing can fix. Losing the authenticator app that shows your two-factor code is a smaller problem with a way out, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are having.

One of the ten recovery codes shown when you turned two-factor on signs you in, in the same box the six digits go in. So does any machine still signed in: it keeps its session, and Settings → Account there will turn two-factor off for your password — no code needed, which is the whole point of that exit. If both are gone the account door stays shut, because there is nothing here that could open it. Your vault is a separate matter, and it stays readable on any machine that already holds it.

This is the route that works, and it is worth trying before anything else. On a machine where Termiyo is still unlocked, open Settings → Account and change your password there. The app re-encrypts what it holds with the new one, because it has the old one in memory to do it with.

A phone or a second laptop that has not been locked since you last used it counts. So does a machine you have not opened in months, as long as you remember the password it was set up with.

Termiyo takes a copy of your vault before a new version opens it, and can take encrypted backups on a schedule. Those are protected by the password that was set when they were made — an older one, if you have changed it since. Settings → Help shows where the automatic copies are.

Then the encrypted data cannot be recovered, by us or by anyone, and the honest thing is to say so rather than leave you trying links. What you can do is start again: create a fresh vault in the app, and write to info@termiyo.com if the account itself needs sorting out — a subscription to move, or an address to free up.

Hosts and keys are the part that hurts. Everything else — the account, the plan, your devices — is ours to fix and we will.

Turn on scheduled backups (Settings → Backup) and keep the passphrase somewhere that is not only in your head. It is the one thing that turns this page from bad news into an inconvenience.

How Termiyo protects your data