Lock
Low threat
Screen lock. Session preserved. A warning ward — nothing lost.
How it works
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Tripwire
A USB device is removed or inserted, Bluetooth goes out of range, or AC power is lost. The wards are breached.
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Conjure
A composite threat score materializes in under 5 ms. The spell is already cast before the attacker knows.
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Vanish
Graduated hex: screen lock, vault sealed, or keys destroyed and power cut. The secrets were never there.
The grimoire
DeadWitch doesn't erase pages. It burns the only key that can read them.
LUKS volume
Your grimoire is a LUKS-encrypted volume. Data stays on disk, sealed — unreadable without the encryption key held in kernel memory.
luksSuspend
The key vanishes from kernel memory via memzero_explicit(). A kernel-level incantation — no userspace spell can replicate.
luksErase
Obliterates LUKS keyslots using AF-stripes (4000x inflation). The key is not hidden — it ceases to exist. Recovery is mathematically impossible.
Host survives
The machine lives on after KILL. Only the grimoire burns — the OS and host data are untouched. A clean disappearing act.
File shredding is slow and unreliable on SSDs due to wear leveling. Key destruction is instant, silent, and mathematically final.
Response levels
Seal
Medium threat
Grimoire sealed. luksSuspend makes the keys vanish from kernel memory.
Kill
High threat
Grimoire destroyed. RAM wiped. Power cut. The keys never existed.
Familiars
Physical sentinels that watch for disturbances.
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USB familiar
Removal or insertion of any device breaks the circle. Under 5 ms to detect.
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Bluetooth familiar
Your phone moves out of range. The bond is severed, the spell triggers.
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AC Power
Power loss breaks the ritual. Unplug the machine, the witch acts.
Features
deadwitch init
The summoning ritual. Guided setup with human-readable prompts. Armed in minutes.
Duress Password
A decoy grimoire opens. Behind the curtain, the real LUKS header is silently destroyed.
Scrying Mode
24-hour divination. The witch studies your hardware before binding the wards.
Travel Mode
Reduced grace periods. Heightened sensitivity. The witch's finger rests on the trigger.
5-Level Failsafe
Five nested wards: daemon → watchdog → OnFailure → udev → raw syscall. Kill the process, the spell still fires.
Host Preservation
The machine survives the ritual. Only the grimoire is sacrificed.
Quick Spells
- I. The Summoning
sudo deadwitch init- II. Read the Omens
deadwitchctl status- III. Raise the Wards
deadwitchctl profile alert- IV. Suspend the Ritual
deadwitchctl pause 5m- V. Diagnose the Circle
deadwitchctl doctor
Architecture
Privilege separation. Four binaries, two trust zones.
root
deadwitchd
Daemon. Events, crypto, LUKS ops
user
deadwitchctl
CLI. Status, profiles, whitelist
deadwitch-gui
System tray. PIN, status, emergency
deadwitch
Setup wizard. Guided init
Who is this for
Journalists, lawyers, activists, researchers, and developers who work with sensitive data in physically exposed environments — at border crossings, in conflict zones, or in public spaces where device theft or seizure is a realistic threat.
Ethics
Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies.
Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers?
The witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect.
So great was the witches' knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.
Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
The universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual to reliably encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it.
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
When the powerful demand to see your thoughts, the only safe thought is the one that cannot be found.
They burned those who knew too much. Today, they seize their devices. The witch learned to destroy her grimoire before they could read it.
We apply the doctrine of double effect: the intent is protection, the positive effect doesn't require a negative one, and the proportionality is clear.