How do we reduce the blast radius if credentials, identities, or internal systems are compromised?

Refined Question

When — not if — a credential, service account, or internal system is compromised, what determines how much sensitive data the attacker walks away with? How do we make that answer "very little" by construction?

Why This Matters

With conventional database security, application credentials are an all-or-nothing grant: whoever holds them can read everything the application can. Most large breaches are not exotic exploits — they are legitimate credentials used illegitimately, at scale.

Why CipherStash

CipherStash makes decryption — not connection — the controlled operation. Every value is encrypted with its own key, derived only for an authorised identity, so a compromised credential can decrypt only the slice of data its identity maps to.

This allows:

• Stolen application credentials to yield ciphertext rather than datasets
• A compromised service to expose only its own narrow data scope
• Bulk exfiltration to become cryptographically pointless
• Incident response to enumerate exactly which values were decrypted

Key Differentiators

• 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
• Cryptographic auditability — a verifiable record of who decrypted what, and when
• Application-layer encryption — data is protected before it reaches the database
• Searchable encryption — equality, range, and free-text queries over encrypted Postgres fields, with standard indexes