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This page collects the most common questions users ask about Secure Crypt — from the basics of password security and file handling to specifics of the Force Lock feature and cross-platform compatibility. If you have a question that is not answered here, refer to the Encryption Details or File Format reference pages.
No. AES-256-GCM is a symmetric cipher with no backdoor or recovery mechanism built in. The only input to key derivation is your password; there is no secondary key, password hint, recovery code, or escrow copy stored anywhere by Secure Crypt.If the password is lost, the encrypted data is permanently inaccessible. There is no way to reverse the encryption without the original password — this is a deliberate property of the cryptographic design, not a missing feature.Best practice: Store your password in a reputable password manager before locking any important files.
The file was encrypted with the Force Password Every Time checkbox enabled (the “Force Lock” option). When this option is active at lock time, Secure Crypt writes the byte 0x4D (ASCII 'M') as the first byte of the file header.When you later attempt a permanent Unlock File or Unlock Folder operation, Secure Crypt reads that flag byte before prompting for a password. If it equals b'M', the permanent unlock is rejected immediately and the message is shown.To access the file, use ⚡ Quick View File or ⚡ Quick View Folder instead. Quick View will decrypt the file into a temporary directory, let you view or edit it, and then re-lock it with the same flag preserved when you click Save Edits & Relock.
Yes. When you lock a file or folder, Secure Crypt writes the encrypted .scrypt or .scryptfold file to disk and then deletes the original. The encrypted file takes the place of the original.This means there is no plaintext copy remaining after a successful lock operation. If you are not completely certain about your password, keep a separate backup of the original file before locking it.
Yes. The .scrypt and .scryptfold formats are fully cross-platform. A file encrypted on Windows can be decrypted on macOS or Linux — and vice versa — using the same password.The file format is a raw binary layout (a 29-byte header followed by AES-GCM ciphertext) with no platform-specific components. The cryptographic operations use the same underlying OpenSSL routines on all supported platforms through the PyCA cryptography library.
AES-GCM includes a 16-byte authentication tag that covers every byte of the ciphertext. If any bit in the ciphertext (or the header salt/nonce fields) is altered — whether through file corruption, storage error, or deliberate tampering — decryption will fail.Secure Crypt catches the resulting InvalidTag exception and displays:
“Incorrect password or corrupted data.”
There is no way to partially decrypt a corrupted AES-GCM file. The authentication check is all-or-nothing by design.
Secure Crypt takes several steps to minimise traces, but complete sanitisation depends on your operating system:
  • The decrypted file or folder is written to a temporary directory created by tempfile.mkdtemp().
  • After you click Save Edits & Relock, the entire temporary directory is deleted with shutil.rmtree().
  • The clipboard is cleared immediately after re-locking (clipboard_clear() followed by clipboard_append('')).
However, Secure Crypt cannot control OS-level swap files, hibernation images, application caches (such as thumbnails or recent-files lists), or filesystem journals. These may retain traces of the decrypted content beyond what Secure Crypt can clean up. For highly sensitive files, consider using an encrypted storage volume or disabling swap before performing a Quick View.
The current version of Secure Crypt handles one file or one folder per operation. There is no batch file selection for individual files.To encrypt multiple files in a single operation, place all the files you want to protect into one folder and use 📂 Lock Folder. Secure Crypt will ZIP the entire folder tree and encrypt it as a single .scryptfold file.
.scryptfold is the file extension Secure Crypt uses for encrypted folders. Internally, a .scryptfold file is an AES-256-GCM encrypted ZIP archive of the original folder.When you lock a folder, Secure Crypt:
  1. Compresses the entire folder tree into a ZIP archive in memory using Python’s zipfile module.
  2. Encrypts the ZIP bytes as a single blob using AES-256-GCM.
  3. Prepends the 29-byte header (flag + salt + nonce) and writes the result to disk as <folder-name>.scryptfold.
After decryption, the plaintext is a valid ZIP file whose contents reproduce the original folder structure exactly.
No. Secure Crypt is a GUI desktop application built with Tkinter. The vault_engine.py module is an internal module used exclusively by the GUI — it is not published to PyPI and has no stable public API, versioned interface, or documented entry points intended for external use.If you need programmatic AES-256-GCM encryption in Python, use the PyCA cryptography library directly:
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.ciphers.aead import AESGCM
Refer to the Encryption Details page for the exact parameters Secure Crypt uses.
Secure Crypt is distributed as a standalone executable built with PyInstaller. To build from source you need Python 3.11 and two packages listed in requirements.txt:
pip install cryptography pyinstaller
Once the dependencies are installed, run the platform-specific PyInstaller command to produce a single-file executable. See the Installation page for the exact pyinstaller invocation for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

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