Security and privacy

What stays on your PC, and what never leaves it

• No telemetry, no analytics, no servers of ours. The app has nothing that reports back to us. It cannot know you installed it.
• Passwords are kept by Windows, in the Credential Manager, the same place browsers keep theirs. Never in the app's files, never in the logs. In portable mode they are only kept while the app is open.
• Your Steam password never goes through the app. Signing in inside the app uses Steam's own sign-in: the password is encrypted with Steam's key before it leaves your PC, and the app keeps only Steam's "remember this device" token, if you ask for it.
• The app only talks to a few places, and only when it needs to: Steam (to download the server and the mods and to read public Workshop information), GitHub (to check for a new version, only after you say yes), Discord on your own PC (only if you turn the invites on), and a public IP service (only when you press "See my public IP").
• No administrator rights, except one step: creating the Windows Firewall rule for the server, which Windows itself asks you to confirm.

Your server is private by default

• A password is required (at least 12 characters) and only people who know it get in. The app never writes the server on the game's public list unless you choose that.
• The server never opens ports on your router by itself (UPnP is always off). You decide if and which ports to open, following the guide.
• Remote console (RCON) is always off. Commands go only through the app, on your PC.
• Backups of the server file never keep the password. Old backups from earlier versions are cleaned when the app opens.
• Share your public IP only with friends, in private. The app warns you before putting it in an invite, and the Discord format hides it from the preview.

How to check that the download is the real one

Every version publishes the SHA-256 code of its KnoxSafehouse.exe: a fingerprint of the file. If the code of the file you downloaded is the same, the file is the one we published, byte for byte.

In Windows, open PowerShell in the folder of the file and run:

Get-FileHash .\KnoxSafehouse.exe -Algorithm SHA256

Compare the result with the code on the version's page. If they differ, delete the file and download it again from this site.

Windows SmartScreen may warn you. That happens because the app is not digitally signed yet, not because something is wrong with it. After checking the code, click "More info" and then "Run anyway". The installed copy and the updates the app confirms do not show the warning again.

Updates inside the app work the same way: the app downloads the new version from GitHub, checks its SHA-256 against the published one, and only then replaces itself. If anything does not match, it deletes the file and changes nothing.

See the published versions and their codes

Mods are other people's code

Workshop mods run inside the server, on your PC. The app checks that they are the right items, that their files are where they should be and that the list is in order, but it cannot tell whether a mod is safe: that is up to the mod's author and to you. Prefer mods with many subscribers and recent updates, and read their comments.

Everything the app reads from outside (Steam's answers, the mods' files, imported profiles, the server's output) is treated as untrusted: it is checked against strict formats and size limits before anything is done with it.

What this site keeps

• Visitors get no cookies and the IP address is never stored. We count visits, downloads and the country. To count each person once a day we use a temporary code that changes every day; the previous day's codes are deleted.
• The Community sign-in (Discord or GitHub) keeps only your public name and profile picture, your messages and an encrypted code of your IP block, used only to ban people who abuse the site. Never your password or e-mail. You can delete your account at any time, and everything you wrote goes with it.
• Messages are checked automatically for racism, hate, threats and sexual content; one caught that way is deleted at once and never stored.
• Admins are accountable. Only the Discord accounts on a list we keep can moderate, their rights expire 12 hours after each sign-in, and every ban, deletion or reset is written down with who did it.

Found a security problem?

Please do not post it in public. Send it privately through the project's GitHub (a private message to the author, or a private security report on the repository). Tell us the version (and the SHA-256 of the .exe), the steps to reproduce it and what you think it can cause.

We answer as soon as we can and agree with you on when to make it public, after there is a fix. Thank you for helping keep everyone's safehouse safe.

The project on GitHub · Privacy questions in Help