Improve auditability of sensitive data access

Refined Question

When an auditor, customer, or incident commander asks "who has accessed this person's data in the last 90 days?", we want a precise answer — not a best-effort reconstruction from application logs. How do we make sensitive data access genuinely auditable?

Why This Matters

Database logs record queries, not meaning: they rarely capture which human was behind a request, and they can be bypassed, truncated, or simply never enabled. Accountability built on incomplete logs collapses exactly when it matters — during an investigation.

Why CipherStash

CipherStash makes decryption the audited event. Because every sensitive value requires an identity-bound key derivation to read, the audit trail is a complete, tamper-evident record of actual access — not a sampling of queries.

This allows:

• Every decryption to be attributed to a verified identity
• Access reviews to be answered from authoritative records
• Incident scope to be enumerated value-by-value
• Customer and regulator questions to be answered with evidence

Key Differentiators

• Cryptographic auditability — a verifiable record of who decrypted what, and when
• Identity-aware decryption — every decryption is bound to the identity behind the request
• Per-value keys via ZeroKMS — keys are derived on demand, never stored
• Application-layer encryption — data is protected before it reaches the database
• No re-platforming — works over the Postgres you already run