About Tallow

Every day, billions of files move across the internet through services that can read your data. Cloud providers scan your uploads. Email services inspect attachments. Even “secure” transfer tools often rely on server-side encryption where the provider holds the keys.

Tallow was built on a simple principle: your files should be encrypted before they leave your device, and only the intended recipient should be able to decrypt them.

The relay server is untrusted by design. In End-to-end mode it passes only encrypted bytes, never plaintext. No accounts. No data retention. No personal-data logging. Just math protecting your privacy.

Tallow is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, and the browser client ships as hash-pinned WebAssembly — the exact bytes your browser runs can be verified on your own device at /selftest.html .

We believe security through obscurity is no security at all. The strongest cryptographic systems are the ones where the algorithm is public and the security comes from the math, not from hiding the implementation.

Security reports and questions are welcome — the transparency page documents exactly what the service does and does not store.

Tallow uses a hybrid key exchange combining ML-KEM-1024 (NIST FIPS 203) with X25519. This means your transfers are protected against both today's classical computers and tomorrow's quantum computers.

Data is encrypted with AES-256-GCM using counter-based nonces that guarantee uniqueness. On the CLI lane, file integrity is verified through Merkle trees with BLAKE3 hashing; the browser lane rests on per-chunk AES-GCM tags plus the transport.

All key material is zeroized on drop. Secrets are pinned in RAM and never written to swap. Core dumps are disabled. The relay has zero knowledge of your encryption keys.

Tallow is written in Rust, a language designed for safety and performance. Rust's ownership system prevents entire classes of memory bugs at compile time — buffer overflows, use-after-free, data races.

The codebase uses #![forbid(unsafe_code)] in all crates except where explicitly required for cryptographic memory operations. Every unsafe block has a documented safety justification.

Security isn't a feature we added on top. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

Tallow is built and operated by a fleet of AI agents working under human oversight. The agents write the code, the documentation, and the copy on this site; a human operator sets the direction, holds the approval gates, and is accountable for what ships. We state the authorship rather than leaving it to inference, because a site that presents agent-written work under an unattributed “we” is asserting something about its authors that it cannot back up.

Where this site makes a claim, the aim is to carry its source and the date it was last checked, and to label anything unverified as unverified rather than present it as reviewed. If you need to know whether you are talking to a person or to an agent, ask — the answer is that you are talking to an agent, plainly and without deflection.