Security
Encrypted in depth — even from itself.
Data that moves between sites and sits on machines outside a datacentre needs protection at every layer, not just one. VALIS encrypts in depth, so a single failure — a stolen disk, a tapped link, a compromised database account, an untrusted relay — does not hand everything over at once.
Stolen hardware is useless
The datastore, its backups and its logs sit on encrypted volumes. A seized laptop or a lifted disk yields ciphertext, not data.
Sites prove who they are
Every link between sites is mutually authenticated and encrypted, and every batch of changes is digitally signed by its origin. A site can prove a change is genuine and untampered independently of the network — even if the link between you is hostile.
Even the database cannot read the crown jewels
The most sensitive fields are encrypted in the application, before they ever reach the database. A compromised database account or a curious administrator sees only ciphertext. The keys never live beside the data they protect.
Need-to-know, enforced
Protection that travels with the data.
Sensitive fields move between sites still encrypted, readable only by a site that has been granted the key — shared so that even a site relaying the traffic in between cannot read it. Keys can be rotated without rewriting a single record, and a site’s access can be revoked.
Put another way. It is the digital equivalent of a handling caveat that physically enforces itself. Need-to-know stops being a promise and becomes a property of the data.
Isolation is enforced in the database itself. You only ever see the workspaces you belong to — another team’s data does not exist from where you sit, even if you go looking. Every action, human or machine, is written to an append-only audit trail.
VALIS’s convergence and cryptographic properties are demonstrated by runnable proofs that ship with the code, and its federation is exercised by an adversarial twelve-act run against three live instances. That is a stronger position than most, and it is not the same as a certificate.
This has never had an independent security assessment.
No penetration test, no code audit, no accreditation, no assurance activity of any kind by anyone other than its author. Everything above describes what the code is designed to do and what its own tests demonstrate — which is not the same as what an adversary would find.
An independent assessment would be a prerequisite for any operational use. VALIS is a research demonstrator and is not offered for operational use, so that assessment has not been done. Better to say so plainly here than let anyone discover it later.