Offline and local storage

ZeroTrace is local-first, and licensing is no exception. Your license and credentials are stored securely on your own device or computer, and the products are built to keep working there.

Where your license lives

• On a hardware device, the license is held on the device itself, and the mobile app also keeps it in your phone's secure storage. That is why a device stays licensed after you reinstall the app or re-pair, the credential is with the hardware, not the app.
• On the desktop software, the license is stored securely on your computer using the operating system's own protected credential storage. It is not left sitting in plain text, and it is not kept on a server for you to sign in to.

Working offline

Because the license is stored locally, the products run locally.

• A hardware device verifies its own license and does its work over Bluetooth or USB, with no internet connection involved in day-to-day use.
• The desktop software works on your machine. Once activated, it keeps working offline, an OSINT investigation or a Proxy run happens on your computer, and each tool tells you plainly whether a given action reaches the network for its own task.

What happens without a connection

Once a product is activated, being offline does not lock you out of what you have already unlocked, activation is remembered locally and does not need to be re-confirmed on every launch.

If the desktop software cannot confirm your license at a moment when it needs to, it is designed to fail safe: it holds the tools closed rather than opening them by mistake. This keeps a licensed workbench licensed. If you hit this, it usually means a temporary problem reaching the licensing check; try again shortly. On a hardware device, a momentary glitch reading a stored license does not discard it, the device keeps the key and simply runs at the public level until it can confirm again.

For moving a license to new hardware, see Transfers.