Keys and storage

What the CLI keeps on your machine, where, and who can read it.

Profiles and tokens

Profiles live under ~/.airdress/profiles/, one file per profile, readable by your user only. A profile holds the hub it belongs to, the account it signed in as, its pinned airdress, and its tokens: one refresh token and an access token per airdress. airdress profile show prints a profile with the credentials redacted; airdress auth token is the one command that prints a credential, because asking for it is the point.

Two processes never present the same refresh token twice: a refresh runs under a lock on the profile file and re-reads it first.

Preferences, such as the .airdress directory marker opt-in, are in ~/.airdress/preferences.toml.

Device keys

When the CLI acts as a device of your airdress, for shells or as an agent, it holds keys of its own. They go to the operating system’s secret store where there is one: Keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, the Secret Service on a Linux desktop. Where there is none, they go to files under ~/.local/state/airdress/ readable by your user only. airdress shell device status says which store this machine uses.

One thing to know on Linux: the binary the one-line installer and the editor plugin download is statically linked and cannot reach the Secret Service, so it always uses the file store. A binary you build yourself with cargo build on a glibc system uses the Secret Service. The two stores are separate, so the same airdress reached through both will register two devices rather than one. If that matters to you, use one binary, or move the key deliberately rather than by accident.

Nothing about custody depends on the store: the seed never leaves the device, and your airdress never sees it.

Shell hosts

A shell host keeps its machine key and shell key in ~/.local/state/airdress/shell-host/, so it can start under a user unit without a keychain prompt. Its profiles are in ~/.config/airdress/shells.toml, and nothing over the network can change them. Recordings stay on the host, sealed to the keys of your devices; the host cannot read them.

Function signing keys

airdress fn keygen --out <file> writes an Ed25519 seed to a new file with mode 0600 and refuses to overwrite an existing one. The seed is never printed; its public key and fingerprint are.

Pinned host keys

The fingerprint of every shell host you have connected to is pinned in known-hosts.json beside the shell client’s keys. A host presenting another key fails the handshake, and airdress shell repin is the only way to accept a new one.