Security Whitepaper

Last updated: March 2026

1. The Sovereign Promise

BlueArkive is a 100% offline desktop application. All audio capture, transcription, intelligent summaries, and data storage happen entirely on your own computer. Nothing is ever sent to the cloud.

Core principle: Your meeting data never leaves your machine. You hold the only keys to your information.

2. Audio Privacy

Audio is captured directly from your computer's system and microphone. The sound is processed instantly in your computer's memory to generate transcripts and is never saved as an audio file. As soon as the words are transcribed, the audio data is permanently destroyed.

Works natively with macOS permissions
Requires explicit microphone access
Audio is never saved, uploaded, or shared
Audio data is discarded immediately after transcription

3. AI Models

BlueArkive uses two on-device AI models:

Speech Recognition Engine — State-of-the-art speech-to-text transcription, running via a GPU-accelerated runtime on Apple Silicon
Language Model — Note expansion and summarization, running via a local inference engine

Both models are downloaded securely during the onboarding process and stored locally in ~/Library/Application Support/BlueArkive/models/. Model files are verified using SHA-256 checksums before use. No inference requests are sent to any cloud API.

4. Data Storage & Encryption

All persistent data (meetings, transcripts, notes, entities) is stored in a local SQLite database within the app's sandboxed data directory.

Encryption at rest: AES-256-GCM with authenticated encryption
Key derivation: PBKDF2 with 100,000 iterations and per-user salt
Secret storage: Encryption keys are stored in the macOS Keychain via the keytar library — never written to disk in plaintext
Recovery: Users can generate a BIP39-compatible recovery phrase to restore access to encrypted data

5. Cloud Sync (Optional, Pro Only)

Pro users can optionally enable encrypted cloud sync for multi-device support. When enabled:

All data is encrypted locally before upload using AES-256-GCM
The cloud server receives only ciphertext — it cannot decrypt your data
Local embeddings are generated before encryption to enable semantic search on ciphertext
Conflict resolution uses CRDTs (Yjs) with vector clocks for deterministic merging

Zero-knowledge architecture: Even with full server access, BlueArkive cannot read your meetings. Decryption requires your local key, which never leaves your device.

6. Electron Security

Context Isolation: Enabled — renderer process cannot access Node.js APIs
Node Integration: Disabled — prevents XSS from executing system commands
Content Security Policy: Restricts script sources, connection endpoints, and embedding
IPC Channel Allowlists: Only whitelisted channels can send/receive data between processes
Hardened Runtime: macOS hardened runtime enabled for notarization compatibility

7. Network Activity

BlueArkive makes zero network requests during normal recording and transcription. The only network activity occurs during:

First launch: AI model downloads from our secure CDN (~500MB one-time)
Auto-updates: Checks for new versions (configurable, can be disabled)
Cloud sync (Pro, opt-in): Uploads encrypted data to sync server

There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting to external services, and no phoning home.

8. Vulnerability Disclosure

If you discover a security vulnerability in BlueArkive, please report it responsibly to security@bluearkive.com. We commit to acknowledging reports within 48 hours and providing a fix within 14 days for critical issues.