You just plugged in your Canary

Your Canary opened this page.

You opened the START-HERE file on its drive, or you tapped its button — and it pointed your browser here. It only ever points to this one page, and it can't touch anything on your computer. Here's what just happened, and everything you can do next.

Show me

Everything your Canary can do

Plugging in was step one. Here's the whole toolkit — every one of these is already inside the device or a click away. Nothing to install.

🔌 Watch a plug-in 🩺 Run the Doctor ⚡ Flash it in your browser

The delightful ones (l and a) and everything above work over a USB-serial connection at 115200 baud — press the key, watch it answer. Flip to developer detail for the technical version of each.

🛡️ Why this was safe

A gadget that types on its own is exactly how malicious USB sticks attack a computer. Your Canary is built to be the opposite of that — the safeguards are the point, not an afterthought.

✋It never types on its own. Plugging it in types nothing. You got here one of two ways — you opened the START-HERE file on the drive (no typing at all), or you tapped the physical BOOT button on the device. Either way, a person chose it.
📄The easy way is a plain link. The START-HERE shortcut on the read-only drive is just a bookmark to this page — like a link on any USB stick. Opening it doesn't let the device do anything; it just opens your browser.
🔒One fixed destination. The only address the device can ever type — or put in that shortcut — is this help page (securacv.com/canary). It cannot type commands, run programs, or reach anywhere else — the firmware refuses any other address.
💾Your files are read-only. When your Canary appears as a drive, it is read-only over USB — you can copy evidence off, but nothing on your computer can alter or erase what's on it.
🔌Off by default, yours to disable. This behavior ships turned off and is only in the opt-in USB build. You are always in control.

1Browse your files

On the USB onboarding build your Canary also appears as a read-only drive, the same way a flash drive does — no app, no driver, no account. Open it from your file manager (or the Files app on an iPhone/iPad) and your evidence is just… files.

/WITNESS/The append-only, signed witness log (records.jsonl). The tamper-evident record of what happened — never who.
/HEALTH/Device diagnostics and health history.
/CHAIN/A backup of the hash-chain head used for integrity checks.
/VAULT/Sealed evidence snapshots (.svlt), encrypted to your key — see unsealing below.
Verify it yourself. Copy /WITNESS/records.jsonl to your computer and run tools/verify_witness_log.py from the repository to confirm every entry's signature and the unbroken chain.

2Recover your device

Your evidence is safe by design. Recovery is mostly about letting the device rebuild its own bookkeeping from the durable log on the SD card.

1

The log outlives a reset

A factory reset erases only the device's stored settings (Wi-Fi, name, keys cache in NVS). It never touches the witness evidence on the SD card.

2

The SD card wins on boot

At startup the Canary compares its cached position with the log on the SD card and adopts the card's version — but only if it's further ahead and its signature verifies under this device's key.

3

To recover

Re-seat the SD card and reboot. The chain head is rebuilt from the card automatically. Nothing to reinstall, nothing to lose.

4

On the console

Connect over USB serial and press v for the recovery guide, or s for full device status.

Hold BOOT for 5 seconds only if you mean it. That triggers a factory reset of settings. Your SD evidence survives, but the device will need setup again.

3Unseal your evidence

Sealed snapshots (.svlt files in /VAULT) are encrypted to your public key when they're captured. The Canary holds only the public key, so it is structurally unable to open them — that's the privacy guarantee, not a limitation. Only you can.

1

Copy them off

From the read-only drive, copy the .svlt files in /VAULT to your computer.

2

Unseal with your private key

Run tools/unseal_snapshot.py with your private key. The images decrypt on your machine — never on the device, never on our servers.

Console quick reference

You don't need any of this to open the page — that's what the START-HERE file and a BOOT tap are for. But if you connect over USB serial at 115200 baud, these keys are available:

uOpen this help page (announces a preview, then waits for a BOOT press)
oUSB onboarding status; cycle the launch method (manual / macOS / Windows / Linux)
vRecovery guide
kUnseal guide
sDevice status
iDevice identity (id + public key)
BOOTTap = open this page · 2s = status · 5s = factory reset
Prefer no typing at all? Just open the START-HERE file on the drive — it's an ordinary bookmark to this page, so the device types nothing. Or set the launch method to manual (press o) so a BOOT tap only types the address into a field you've focused and you press Enter.