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Most password managers make your life easier by syncing your credentials across devices and browsers through the cloud. The tradeoff? Your most sensitive data lives on someone else’s servers.

When I built IronPass, I wanted to take a different path: a local-first password manager where every password stays encrypted on your device — never sent to us, never stored on a server.

That philosophy gave us unmatched privacy, but also a big problem:
How do you access your passwords outside the app — like in your browser — without syncing them to the cloud?

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The Challenge of Local-Only Storage

Storing passwords locally gives users confidence that no third party can access their data. But it also introduces friction:

• Your credentials are “locked” inside one device.
• Traditional autofill in browsers becomes difficult.
• People expect cross-device convenience, especially when logging into websites.

We didn’t want to compromise privacy for convenience, so we had to get creative.

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Why Not Cloud Sync?

When designing IronPass, we explored several approaches:

• Cloud sync → Convenient but it breaks our promise that no server ever stores user data.
• Manual export/import → Technically works, but feels clunky and outdated.
• Direct peer-to-peer sync → Unreliable. It requires both devices to be awake and on the same network.

None of these fit IronPass’ core principle: privacy first.

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The IronPass Solution

Instead of storing data in the cloud, we designed a QR-based, encrypted transfer flow that works seamlessly between the IronPass iOS app and our browser extension.

Here’s how it works:

1. Browser extension generates a secure session and shows a QR code.
2. iOS app scans the QR, encrypts the selected password using AES-256.
3. Password is transmitted via a temporary relay server, but only in encrypted form. The server never sees your data.
4. Browser extension receives and decrypts the password locally.
5. Passwords are auto-cleared in a few minutes (or manually), leaving nothing behind.

The result: secure autofill in your browser, without ever storing credentials online and also making sure the data is end to end zero knowledge encrypted.

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Flow Diagram

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The Result

• Truly cross-platform: IronPass now works not just on iOS, but also inside browsers like Safari and Chrome (Coming soon).
• Still local-first: No persistent data ever leaves your device.
• Seamless UX: Autofill feels as smooth as any cloud-based manager.
• Privacy uncompromised: Each transfer uses fresh encryption, passwords vanish after use.

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Closing Thoughts

The journey to making IronPass cross-platform taught us that you don’t need to compromise privacy to deliver convenience. With the right design choices, you can have both.

IronPass remains true to its foundation: your passwords are yours alone.

Try it today: Download IronPass on the App Store

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