Explore the cryptographic process behind creating a secure 1Password account in this interactive explainer. See how your Account Password and Secret Key work together to protect your data.
This explainer uses @edeckers/lib1password-unofficial, an implementation based on 1Password's Security Design white paper. Everything runs in your browser; no data leaves your device.
ℹ️ This is a simulation, no actual account will be created
This password never leaves your device and is never stored by 1Password
The Secret Key that was just generated is the foundation of 1Password's security. The 26-character random portion, with each character drawn from 31 (2^5) possible values consisting of uppercase letters and digits, provides just over 128 bits of entropy (26 × 5 bits) that never leaves your device. The remaining characters are the version prefix and account identifier.
Your password and Secret Key are combined through PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function) with 650,000 iterations to derive the Account Unlock Key (AUK). This intentionally slow process makes brute-force attacks computationally expensive: an attacker must perform 650,000 operations per password guess, drastically limiting the number of attempts they can make.
The Account Unlock Key now decrypts your symmetric keyset access key, which in turn protects your asymmetric keyset keypair. To share vault access, a copy of the vault key is encrypted with each recipient's public key. The recipient then uses their private key to decrypt and access the vault key, enabling secure sharing without transmitting keys in plaintext.
Your account is now ready with its complete key hierarchy. Let's put it to use and encrypt a vault item to see how AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption protects your data. Each item is encrypted independently with its own initialization vector, ensuring that even identical passwords produce different ciphertext.
Your data is now encrypted with AES-256-GCM, transformed into ciphertext that only your vault key can unlock. Let's reverse the process and decrypt it to retrieve the original data. The GCM mode's authentication ensures that any tampering with the encrypted data will be detected; decryption will fail if even a single bit has been modified.