macOS data protection keychain for Electron apps
Details
- External ID
- 49349159
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- macOS data protection keychain for Electron apps
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Aug. 18, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 24
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7815860215053764
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Hey HN,I've been working on Hansel [1] (an encrypted personal data store you can query with agents), and there wasn't a good way to use the modern macOS Data Protection Keychain.Electron's safeStorage [2] uses the legacy file-based keychain, which allows other apps/agents to query it with the `security` CLI. Not great when you have a dozen agents running in the background! The Data Protection Keychain is nice because it limits access via code-signing access groups and lets you set access rules like Touch ID and/or password.1: https://hansel.so/2. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- secure keychain for electron apps
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Integrating macOS Data Protection Keychain into Electron requires writing native Objective-C/C++ Node native addons (N-API) and dealing with macOS entitlements and code-signing.
What it would actually take: This requires a native Node.js addon (via N-API / node-gyp) interfacing with Apple's `Security.framework` (`SecItemAdd`, `kSecAttrAccessible`), avoiding the legacy `SecKeychain` API. The challenging aspects include dealing with hardened runtime requirements, sandboxing entitlements, code signing identities, and multi-threaded IPC between Node.js and macOS security daemons. It requires specialized knowledge of macOS native APIs and C++ Node addon architecture.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Security risk with CLI accessing safeStorage on distributed agents, Limited to macOS, defeats Electron's cross-platform purpose, Lacks Linux and Windows support
Feature requests: Expand support to Linux and Windows equivalents
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #16 of 86 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 292 days after the earliest competitor.
- Securelytix Data VaultKey · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- SecureKit Private Vault · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Safelight:Photo Vault & Search · ph · 2026-09-28 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Memories on Cloud · ph · 2026-09-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- UniDoc Encryption · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- API Keys, without the terminal · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Klaus · hn · 2026-03-11 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- linqlo · ph · 2026-09-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.