Why WebDAV Uses Its Own Password, Not Your Account Password

When you enable WebDAV to mount your vault as a drive in Finder, Explorer, or rclone, LifetimeCloud generates a separate 72-character token instead of asking you to type your real password into a third-party app. That's a deliberate security decision, not an inconvenience.

The problem with reusing your real password

Your account password is more than a login credential on LifetimeCloud — it's the seed that derives your zero-knowledge encryption key (see our PBKDF2 explainer for how that derivation works). Typing that same password into a WebDAV client, a script, or a third-party app means:

• That app, and anything logging its network traffic, now has your real password.
• If you want to stop that one app's access, your only option is to change your account password — breaking every other place you're logged in.
• A leak from a poorly-secured WebDAV client would compromise your primary credential, not just file access.

How the token works instead

Turning on WebDAV from your profile settings generates a random 72-character token — long enough that guessing it is not a realistic attack — used purely as the WebDAV login password. Your actual account password is never involved in a WebDAV connection.

This is the same principle behind "app passwords" on Google or GitHub: a credential scoped to one integration, revocable without touching your main login.

When to regenerate your token

A few situations where hitting "Regenerate" is the right call:

• You configured a WebDAV client on a device you no longer use or trust.
• You shared your screen or a config file that happened to show the token.
• You're simply rotating credentials periodically as good practice.

Regenerating takes effect immediately — any client still using the old token starts getting authentication errors on its next request, with no grace period.

Setting it up

From your profile, find the WebDAV section and enable it to generate your token. From there, follow the client-specific setup steps — Finder, Explorer, Cyberduck, and rclone — in our full WebDAV & rclone mounting guide.