Credentials & storage

Passwords and passphrases

Server passwords and SSH key passphrases are stored in the macOS Keychain — the same encrypted store Safari and Mail use. They’re never written to a file in plain text. Deleting a host deletes its Keychain entry too.

If you deny Termini access to the Keychain, it tells you specifically (Access denied by user) rather than failing silently.

Hosts, known hosts and snippets

These are stored in Termini’s own app container, readable only by your user (files 0600 in a 0700 folder). The host file holds only metadata — name, address, port, user, sign-in method, notes — never a secret.

Key files

Your private keys stay where they are, in ~/.ssh. Termini reads them when connecting, with the permission you granted; it doesn’t copy them.

Exports and sync

Backups and sync carry hosts, snippets and workspaces — never passwords or passphrases.

Under the hood

Connections use standard SSH and SFTP: encrypted, integrity-checked, and server-authenticated by host key. Termini is built on Citadel and Apple’s swift-nio-ssh, on BoringSSL. Its OpenSSH key parser refuses oversized or malformed key files before reading them, so a hostile file can’t exhaust memory.