Security, evidence and current limits.
This page describes qualified Sparse Guard properties for security, risk and procurement review. It does not claim certifications or custody models that have not been independently qualified.
Identity and access
Sparse Guard does not replace your identity provider or policy engine. It sits on the execution path and enforces the decision.
- Tenant isolation — organisation data and keys are bound to the tenant
- Scoped API keys — workloads authenticate with tenant-bound keys
- Revocation — keys can be revoked; revoked keys are not usable
- Least-privilege capabilities — scoped, expiring, single-use by default
- Replay protection — reused capability tokens are rejected
Tamper-evident signed evidence
- Signed execution evidence
- Signed run manifests
- Signed correction records that preserve the original
- Signed crypto-shredding evidence
- Ed25519 signed receipts with server-side verification
- Purpose-separated signing keys
Evidence is signed and tamper-evident. It is not a WORM archive, not an immutable database, and not a complete global ledger.
Credential custody
Reusable destination credentials stay outside the agent runtime. Guard uses them only inside the protected execute path.
- Customers can revoke, purge and crypto-shred credentials
- Destruction produces signed evidence
- Cross-tenant isolation on custody and recovery requests
Customer-controlled recovery
Break-glass is disabled by default and requires at least two authorised customer approvers. Sparse Guard never holds the customer's recovery private key. Recovery output is encrypted to the customer's key, the Guard-held credential is revoked automatically, and the event produces signed evidence.
This is multi-party authorization, not threshold cryptography. It does not claim that administrative access is impossible.
Recovery and data lifecycle
- Tenant export — download organisation data
- Verified tenant erase — delete organisation data with verification
- Recovery with hash verification
- Erased tenant authority cannot be restored through an old recovery snapshot
Release integrity
- Build-once / promote-same-bytes release control
- Worker bundle hashing
- CycloneDX SBOM
- Signed artifact attestation
- Stage-first qualification
Audit evidence
Tamper-evident external audit replica
- Signed deterministic batch chain
- External read-back verification
- Standalone verifier
- Stage and production audit keys are separated
Not currently qualified as WORM storage.
This replica is tamper-evident. It does not provide independent custody or an independent administrative boundary.
Current limitations
- No SOC 2 yet
- Independent pen test not yet completed
- Guard is on the critical path for protected actions
- No offline execution path — if Guard is unavailable, protected actions do not execute through Guard
- Evidence is signed and tamper-evident, not WORM
- Current outbound action support is still narrow
- Guard only protects paths that actually go through Guard
Trust status
| Control | Status |
|---|---|
| Signed decision evidence | Qualified |
| Purpose-separated signing keys | Qualified |
| Tenant export | Qualified |
| Verified tenant deletion | Qualified |
| Tenant-level recovery | Qualified |
| Customer break-glass recovery | Qualified (disabled by default) |
| SBOM + signed release evidence | Qualified |
| Tamper-evident audit replica | Qualified |
| External WORM custody | Not currently claimed |
| SOC 2 | Not yet |
| Independent penetration test | Not yet independently qualified |
What this page does not claim
Sparse Guard does not currently claim SOC 2, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, PCI DSS, GDPR certification, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or an independent penetration-test certification.
Absence of a claim is not a statement about legal obligations. It means those certifications are not presented as qualified product evidence.