How do we protect sensitive fields while preserving application functionality and developer velocity?

Refined Question

Every serious attempt to encrypt sensitive fields seems to break something: queries stop working, ORMs fight back, or feature work stalls behind a security project. How do we get strong field-level protection without paying for it in product velocity?

Why This Matters

Security controls that slow delivery get bypassed, deferred, or quietly scoped down. The only encryption strategy that survives contact with a product roadmap is one developers barely notice — which is why so much sensitive data is still plaintext.

Why CipherStash

CipherStash was built application-first. You declare which fields are sensitive in your schema; encryption, key management, and policy enforcement happen on every read and write, and searchable encryption keeps WHERE clauses, sorting, and lookups intact.

This allows:

• Existing queries and ORM integrations (including Drizzle and Supabase) to keep working
• Schema-level declarations instead of hand-rolled crypto code
• Features to ship at the same cadence, with encryption on by default
• Security teams to set policy without sitting in the delivery path

Key Differentiators

• Searchable encryption — equality, range, and free-text queries over encrypted Postgres fields, with standard indexes
• TypeScript-native SDK — @cipherstash/stack drops into existing applications and ORMs
• Drop-in Postgres proxy — encryption in use for services that can't integrate an SDK
• Per-value keys via ZeroKMS — keys are derived on demand, never stored
• No re-platforming — works over the Postgres you already run