About
One person. No team, no investors, no advisory board.
My name is Rasty Turek and I'm the person behind Vaultaire.
One engineer, one codebase, one set of architectural decisions that answer to nobody except the people who use this app. That's the whole org chart.
Why one person matters
When you build a privacy tool with a team, you create a surface area problem. Every engineer who touches the codebase has access to the architecture. Every investor who funds the company has an opinion about monetization. Every board member has a fiduciary duty that might conflict with your right to keep your files private.
Vaultaire is built and operated by one person. The app has no Vaultaire account service and no provider-held vault decryption key. Its security architecture uses AES-256-GCM, PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512, iOS Keychain, and client-side encrypted CloudKit records. That provider boundary limits what the company can disclose, while the shipped client, iOS, the device, and the implementation remain part of the trust model.
Background
I started my career as an engineer at Google. After that, I built a few companies — each one focused on scale, data infrastructure, and systems that handle millions of users. Security was always a thread running through that work. When you operate at scale, you learn fast that the architecture either protects people by default or it doesn't protect them at all.
Along the way I built companies in the security and content-attribution space, working on problems where data integrity and access control aren't features — they're the product. That background shaped how I think about encryption, key management, and what it means for software to be genuinely zero-knowledge.
More recently I've been focused on AI tooling — agents, eval systems, and developer workflows across iOS, macOS, and the web. The common thread is the same: build things that ship real value without requiring people to hand over their data to use them.
What Vaultaire is
Vaultaire is where my security background and my interest in cryptographic design meet. I wanted to build an encrypted vault that does what most vault apps only pretend to do — actually encrypt your files, not just hide them behind a PIN screen. A pattern you draw derives the vault key that authenticates the encrypted index and unwraps a separate random master key for AES-256-GCM file encryption. I do not operate a service that receives your readable vault contents or decryption keys, so I cannot retrieve them for you or disclose a provider-held copy.
The duress vault — where drawing a specific pattern under coercion silently removes local indexes and recovery mappings for your other vaults — exists because I thought about the people who need this most. Journalists, activists, abuse survivors, travelers crossing hostile borders. These aren't theoretical users. They're why Vaultaire separates what the ordinary interface reveals from what encrypted app-container storage may still expose to a forensic examiner.
How I build
I obsess over the details most people skip. Binary size, because bloat is a signal of carelessness. Typography, because visual precision reflects engineering precision. Context efficiency, because building with AI means every wasted token is a wasted decision.
I'm wrong a lot, and I prefer it that way — being wrong quickly is how you converge on something worth shipping.
Vaultaire has no advertising SDK or identity account. In-app analytics, crash diagnostics, and Apple Ads attribution remain off until you enable Help Improve Vaultaire in Settings. If enabled, the documented flows use pseudonymous identifiers and coarse product events while excluding vault contents, patterns, recovery phrases, filenames, file types, share IDs, and vault IDs.
If something is broken, use the support form. I read everything.