Security

Pockode gives your phone full read, write and AI-execution access to the machine it runs on. This page says how that access is guarded, and where it is not.

What runs where

• Everything that touches your code runs on your machine. The Pockode server, your project, and the AI CLI (Claude Code or Codex) all run locally. The CLI uses your own sign-in, keeps it itself and talks to its provider directly; Pockode does not proxy those calls.
• Your phone is a browser. It shows the app and sends what you type; your project stays on the machine.
• The cloud relay only connects the two. It is on by default, so the phone can reach a machine behind NAT without port forwarding.

Authentication

• One password guards everything. There are no accounts or roles: whoever has the password can do anything you can on that machine. The server refuses to start without one and never generates a default.
• Generate it; do not reuse one. Failed logins are not rate-limited or locked out, so the password’s strength is the whole defence.
• On a shared machine, keep it out of the process list. A -password flag is visible to every user on the machine. Set POCKODE_PASSWORD in your environment instead, from a file only you can read — a shell profile, for example, once no one else can read it; the server removes it at startup, so the AI CLI and anything it runs do not inherit it. Typed inline, as POCKODE_PASSWORD=… pockode, it lands in your shell history just as the flag does.
• The browser keeps a session, not the password. Logging in exchanges the password for a random 256-bit session token, stored on the server only as a hash. A session expires after 30 days unused, and changing the password logs every device out.
• Credentials on disk are private to you. The data directory that holds them is restricted to your user (and, on Windows, SYSTEM and Administrators).

The relay

• TLS on both hops. Phone to cloud is HTTPS; your machine to cloud is an outbound WSS connection. Nobody on either network can read the traffic.
• What the relay can see. It joins the two TLS connections, so the traffic is decrypted inside the relay — including the password when you log in through it. It does not inspect, log or store that content; it does record IP addresses, timestamps and connection data. See the privacy policy.
• What it can reach. The app, and — through Port Preview — any port on your machine, each behind the same password. Pockode’s local agent API is refused before it reaches any port.
• Turn it off with -relay=false. None of your traffic then passes through the cloud; the server still fetches a short announcement from the cloud at startup. The phone must then be on the same network as the machine.

Found a vulnerability? Report it privately through GitHub’s Security tab.