Skip to content
Velta GetDownload
Menu

News

Release

Velta 1.5.4: Windows Hello that works, Text-only mode, and Linux packages

· 3 min read

Windows Hello works end to end and its prompt comes to the front on its own. Text-only mode covers unknown senders by default, relay failover is visible, and attachment encryption is out of preview.

The headline is an apology with a fix attached. 1.5.2 shipped a Windows Hello button that could not work: on current Windows, the key-creation API we used is closed to everything but Windows' own components, so enabling failed with an error before a key ever existed. Nobody could have made that button work — it had never worked on any machine. 1.5.4 replaces the whole path.

Windows Hello, working end to end

Privacy & security can now hand the database key to the same system surface Windows itself uses: the key lives in a KeyCredentialManager credential, and the wrap key for your database is derived from a Windows Hello signature. The signature is the gesture — turning it on asks Hello once, and every cold start asks again before your data opens. The signature itself is deterministic, so the same request always re-derives the same key.

Two quality details: the Hello prompt now comes to the front by itself instead of opening behind the window, and the app-lock PIN can stay beside Hello — either one unlocks, and removing the last one puts the key back in Credential Manager.

If you tried Hello on 1.5.2 and hit an error, it never took effect — nothing was stored. Enabling on 1.5.4 works, and if this Windows account has no Hello yet, the first attempt walks you through creating one.

Text-only mode

Messages from people you have not replied to can now arrive as text only: Drawer → Text-only mode sets it for unknown senders (the default choice), for everyone, or off. A covered photo, video, audio message, app, or link preview renders as a card with a per-item Reveal — until you trust the chat, the sender's images never load. Anything Velta cannot classify counts as unknown, so the mode fails closed.

On Android, when the phone is on data roaming, Velta suggests turning it on once per roaming episode — a suggestion only; nothing switches by itself.

Relay failover you can see

When your pinned relay is down and a send takes another route, the Relays dialog now shows what the last send attempt did, and a message that had to detour names the relay it actually used. There is also an optional strict mode — Only send via the pinned relay — that refuses to fail over at all: if the pin is down, messages wait for it. Sending only; receiving still uses every relay.

Attachment encryption is out of preview

Native profiles now encrypt attachments, thumbnails, and upload staging with the database key — one random key per file, wrapped alongside it, with seekable encrypted chunks so videos still stream from the middle. Two deliberate boundaries: backup exports stay plaintext for compatibility, and notifications on an encrypted profile omit the sender avatar rather than decrypt for the toast.

Also in this release