How SSHMount handles your keys and your data
An SFTP client that mounts a volume in the Finder holds two things worth protecting: the credentials that open your server, and the certainty that the server answering is the one you meant. Here is exactly what SSHMount does about both.
- No tracking. No data collection. No third-party analytics.SSHMount's privacy manifests declare exactly that, and Apple publishes them alongside the app.
- No servers of ours in the middle.Traffic goes from your Mac to your server and nowhere else. There is no relay, no cloud account, no sign-up. If our company disappeared tomorrow, your connections would still be between you and your machines.
- Credentials and private keys stay in the Keychain.In a shared access group that the app and its Finder extension can both read — never written to disk in the clear.
- Sandboxed, signed, and distributed through the Mac App Store.No installer from anywhere else, no package to trust, no security setting to lower.
- Host keys are verified, strictly.After the handshake, before authentication. A mismatch always aborts. The Finder extension has no interface of its own, so it refuses unknown hosts outright rather than guessing on your behalf — the app is what asks you, showing the fingerprint, before anything is trusted.
- And this website.No tracking cookies, no consent banner to dismiss, no third-party scripts watching you read.
What happens when you connect
- The TCP connection and the SSH handshakeSSHMount opens the connection straight from your Mac to the host and port in your profile. Nothing is proxied and nothing is relayed.
- The host key is checked — before anything is sentThe server presents its host key. SSHMount looks it up with libssh2's known_hosts implementation, which reads the same file format as OpenSSH: hashed hostnames, wildcard patterns and
@revokedmarkers all behave the way you expect. This happens after the handshake and before authentication. - A mismatch aborts. An unknown host asks — or refusesIf the stored key and the presented key disagree, the connection stops there, every time. If the host is simply unknown, the app shows you the fingerprint and waits: nothing is trusted until you say so. Inside the Finder extension the policy is strict and there is no dialog at all — an extension with no interface cannot ask, so it refuses rather than guess.
- Only then is a credential sentYour password or private key is read from the macOS Keychain and used against a server you have already identified. Terminal sessions go through exactly the same sequence — a terminal hands over a password just as the extension does, so it gets the same check.
Where the secrets live
- Passwords, private keys and passphrases are stored in the macOS Keychain, in an access group shared between the app and its File Provider extension so both can use them without a second copy.
- Nothing is written to disk in the clear. There is no configuration file holding a password.
- Trusted host keys live in a shared known_hosts file, and the Import known_hosts… command brings over the hosts you already trust from
~/.ssh/known_hosts. - Password fields are hidden by default and revealed with a click, so a screen share does not become a credential leak.
What the privacy manifests say
- The
PrivacyInfo.xcprivacyfiles shipped with the app and with its extension declare no tracking, no collected data, no tracking domains and no third-party analytics. Apple publishes those declarations on the App Store product page, where you can check them against this page. - The single declared API category is file timestamps, used for the files the app manages itself.
- Purchases are handled by Apple. What reaches us is subscription status and Apple's aggregate reports — never your payment details.
And this website
- No cookies are set — not one, not even a “functional” one. That is why there is no consent banner here.
- No fonts, scripts, stylesheets or images are loaded from a third-party CDN. Everything is served from this domain, and the page uses the system typeface your Mac already has.
- No analytics product is embedded. Nothing on this page profiles you as you read it.
Your files are already there. Open them.
Stop copying folders back and forth. Mount the server, work in the Finder, keep a terminal open next to it.