The people behind
Cyclone Fortress,Matrix Vault & YoMatrix.
Cyclone Fortress, part of the trilogy of products, is built by a small team with a large ambition: the most capable security and privacy software on the Mac, with an AI layer we build and run ourselves rather than rent from anyone else. It does its work on your Mac, and it asks you before it changes anything. Here is how it came together.
- 2024
November 2024
Nab Bakir
Founder & Chief Technology Officer
BSc (Hons) Computer Science
Leads engineering across the trilogy of products: the macOS and iOS applications and their security architecture, and the AI stack behind Cyclone Fortress and Matrix Vault — the retrieval system that grounds Cyclone Help's answers, the bounded-tool architecture the agent acts through, and the privately-owned infrastructure both of them run on.
LinkedInNovember 2024
Cyclone Fortress, Matrix Vault and YoMatrix
Development begins on three products with one idea behind them — security software that does its work on your own device, on the Mac and iPhone you already own.
- Cyclone Fortress became the privacy and security cockpit for macOS: secure erasure, encrypted vaults, malware scanning, firewall and network control, and a full privacy audit, in one app.
- Matrix Vault became the all-in-one private vault and secure suite for iOS, and YoMatrix the standalone end-to-end encrypted messenger and telecommunication app.
- Cyclone was built on macOS's own machinery rather than around it — working at the level of disks and partitions, file-system events, code signatures and the system firewall. That depth is why it can do things a sandboxed utility simply cannot, and it is also why it is distributed as a signed, notarized installer rather than through an app store.
- The security model came before the features: AES-256 encryption, keys and passwords that stay on your device, and destructive operations that always tell you exactly what they are about to do.
- An AI layer was part of the plan from the outset, and always one we would run ourselves rather than a wrapper around someone else's service. It arrived a year later.
- 2025
November 2025
Matrix Vault trade mark application
The Matrix Vault name is filed as a trade mark application with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
December 2025
Full AI integration
AI arrives in Cyclone Fortress and Matrix Vault — built into the product rather than bolted on, and running on hardware we own.
- Cyclone Help answers questions in plain language: what a feature does, what a result means, and which tool to reach for next. It is grounded in the app's own knowledge, so it explains the software in front of you rather than software in general.
- The Cyclone AI Agent does the work. It acts only through a fixed catalogue of bounded tools — each one either read-only or approval-required — so it can investigate freely and change nothing without your say-so. The whole catalogue is published on this site.
- Both run on our own privately-owned servers. Nothing is sent to a third-party AI service, and questions are processed to produce a reply, not stored.
- When those servers can't be reached, Cyclone Help falls back to an answer set that ships inside the app, so it still explains itself with no connection at all.
- 2026
April 2026
Matrix Vault and YoMatrix: encrypted calling proven across devices
The end-to-end encrypted communications stack shared by YoMatrix and Matrix Vault passes live testing: multi-party video and voice calls between real devices, on real networks. It is the hardest thing in either product to get right.
- Keys are agreed on the device itself — a Curve25519 exchange, derived through HKDF, producing AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption — and a fresh ephemeral key is used rather than one long-lived secret, so compromising a key does not unlock what came before it.
- Group traffic is encrypted separately to every member instead of to one shared group key held on a server. That is more work per message, and it is the point: there is no single key sitting somewhere to be handed over, or to outlive the member it was issued to.
- Calls run as an end-to-end-encrypted mesh over WebRTC — each device encrypts and sends its own stream directly to every other participant. That is why the ceiling is six video or ten voice: the cost on each device climbs with every person added, and the usual way to escape that, mixing the streams on a server, only scales by letting the server see the media.
- A direct route often isn't available at all, because most devices sit behind NAT and firewalls. Where one can't be negotiated the call falls back to a relay that forwards packets it cannot read — the media stays end-to-end encrypted either way, and the relay never holds a key.
May 2026
Matrix Vault and YoMatrix: email arrives inside the messenger
Every account gets two working email addresses — one at yomatrix.app and one at matrixvault.app, both carrying the same name as the messenger handle — and mail sent to either lands as a conversation in the app, beside the encrypted ones. It has been carrying real mail since May.
- Two addresses, two conversations, one identity: mail to the yomatrix.app address arrives in one thread and mail to the matrixvault.app address in another, so two sides of a life stay apart without folders, rules or a second account. Replies go back out as ordinary email from your own address, and that sending address is fixed on the server rather than taken from the app, so it cannot be forged into someone else’s.
- Email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the app says so on every single message. Ordinary mail reaches a mail server in the clear — that is how email works, everywhere — so ours can read a message in the moment before it encrypts it toward your device. Each one therefore carries a permanent “Server-relayed · Not E2E” badge, so it can never be mistaken for the end-to-end encrypted conversations sitting beside it.
- What happens in that moment is bounded, and worth stating: attachments are encrypted in memory before anything is written to disk, subjects, bodies and file names are never logged, and mail that fails the standard sender checks is refused at the door rather than delivered with a warning stuck on it.
- The assistant works on that inbox when you ask it to — summarise what arrived, draft a reply, sort out what actually needs you, or find the message with the invoice in it — and one tap moves an email into the rest of Matrix Vault: the sender saved as a contact, attachments filed into the encrypted file vault, links kept as bookmarks, the whole message stored as a secure note.
- An email is a stranger’s writing, so when the assistant reads one it runs sealed off: no tools, and nothing written into its memory. A message that tries to give your assistant instructions is talking to something that cannot act on them.
June 2026
James Burgess
Chief Executive Officer
An AI-security advocate and technology entrepreneur with more than 20 years in the IT industry, spanning international trade, fintech, cyber security and AI, and previously founder and chief executive of an international trading business that grew beyond $200 million in turnover. Joins to lead the business and take Cyclone Fortress to market.
LinkedInJuly 2026
Cyclone Fortress beta testing opens
The first Apple-notarized, Developer ID-signed installers go out to testers — signed and stapled exactly as the public release will be.
July 2026
The website goes live
cyclonefortress.com opens to the public, translated into 59 languages.
August 2026
Cyclone Fortress trade mark application
The Cyclone Fortress name is filed as a trade mark application with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
September 2026
Lara Bakir
Legal & Administration
Master of Laws (LL.M)
Joins to look after the legal and administrative side of the company.
LinkedInSeptember 2026
What beta testers asked for: a VPN, and Cyclone Fortress on the iPhone
Two things came back from the beta more often than anything else — cover the connection, not just the machine, and let the same licence look after the phone. Both will be answered at launch.
- A VPN inside the app you already have. Cyclone Fortress carries a personal VPN client built on macOS's own VPN machinery, so a profile from any provider connects, reconnects and reports its real state in the app — including an honest “can't tell” wherever macOS won't say, rather than a reassuring green light. We have also started building our own servers, for people who would rather not go and find a provider; that begins as a small trial, and we will keep calling it a trial until it has earned a better word.
- A Cyclone Fortress app for iPhone and iPad, included with the Mac licence rather than sold again. The same key activates it, the phone will not spend the Mac's own activation, and it will ship alongside the macOS release.
- It is deliberately a smaller app, because a phone is a smaller place to work: the Wi-Fi you are on and whether it is secured, the phone's own posture — passcode set, system up to date, signs of tampering, whether a VPN is genuinely up — and a check of any file you hand it against the same threat intelligence the Mac scanner uses.
- What it will not claim: it cannot scan other apps, or the rest of the phone. No iPhone app can — iOS keeps every app in its own box, which is a large part of why the platform is safe — and we would rather say that plainly than sell a scanner with nothing to scan. It will arrive through the App Store for the same reason in reverse: what Cyclone Fortress does on macOS, down at disks, partitions and the firewall, is not possible inside an app store's sandbox, which is why the Mac app is downloaded from here instead.
- It also carries the personal VPN and encrypted DNS controls, the dark-web exposure check, the password and data manager, the speed test and Cyclone Help. The AI agent stays on the Mac, where its tools are. And nothing syncs between your devices — what is in the vault on your phone stays on your phone.
Today
Cyclone Fortress today
One Apple-notarized, Developer ID-signed app, distributed direct from this website rather than through an app store, and built by the people on this page — a complete security suite rather than a single-purpose utility.
- Antivirus and malware defence: a fast local scan, and a deep scan that adds a hash database of millions of known threats, a rule engine, macOS's own XProtect signatures and cloud intelligence, with quarantine for anything it finds. A watcher checks new files as they arrive — from Downloads, from the internet, or any new program you run — for as long as Cyclone is running, including from the menu bar.
- Erasure that stands up to forensic recovery: free-space wiping, file shredding and full-drive destruction, ending in a certificate whose SHA-256 integrity hash covers every claim printed on it — the verdict, the confidence and the amount erased — so an altered record no longer matches.
- Encrypted vaults — including deniable folder vaults that reveal nothing without the right password — and a password and data manager whose contents never leave your Mac.
- Network and privacy: a firewall, encrypted DNS, a personal VPN client, LAN monitoring, an attack-surface audit, a full privacy audit and a dark-web exposure check.
- And the AI across all of it: Cyclone Help to explain any result in plain language, and the Cyclone AI Agent to carry the work out for you.
Want to talk to us? Email support@cyclonefortress.com or use the contact page.