A plain-language guide for anyone who has just been granted access to someone's Sealed Vault.
The Sealed Vault is a zero-knowledge, encrypted private trust platform where someone stored important information for the people they trust — documents, account details, personal wishes, or contacts. You've been granted access to one of these vaults, most likely because you're named as an executor, a trusted person, or a family member handling their affairs.
Everything inside a vault is encrypted so that only someone with the right passphrase can read it — not even The Sealed Vault itself can see the contents. This page walks you through what that means in practice.
Access to a vault works in two separate parts, and you'll typically need both:
If you don't have a passphrase yet: check whatever instructions accompanied the vault ID — the vault owner may have stored it with an attorney, in a separate secure location, or shared it with you through another channel. The Sealed Vault has no way to retrieve or reset a passphrase on anyone's behalf; that is by design, part of what keeps the vault private in the first place.
Once you're in, you'll see whatever the vault owner chose to organize and store — this varies from person to person, but commonly includes:
Everything is decrypted locally in your browser using the passphrase — nothing readable is ever sent to or stored by The Sealed Vault's servers.
Next to documents in a vault, you may see an option to download a Document Provenance Attestation — a report you can print or hand to someone who needs to know a document's history, such as an institution or a court.
In plain terms, this report shows:
Behind the scenes, each of these events is cryptographically linked to the one before it — similar to a tamper-evident seal. If anything in that history were altered after the fact, the chain would no longer line up, and that would be detectable. The report includes the underlying values so this can be independently checked, rather than asking anyone to simply take The Sealed Vault's word for it.
What this report is not: it's an automated, factual record — not a legal opinion, and not a guarantee that any particular court or institution will accept it. Because The Sealed Vault cannot see inside your documents, it cannot and does not attest to what a document says, only that the sealed file hasn't been altered.
Every situation is different, but people in your position commonly find it useful to:
This guide is provided for general, educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, and The Sealed Vault, LLC is not a law firm. Estate and probate processes vary by state and country — if you have questions about your legal responsibilities as an executor or trusted person, please consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.