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Security & Compliance

Lifeboat’s strongest security property is architectural: it is deployed on infrastructure the customer owns, so prompts, completions, model weights, and usage data never leave the environment — including in fully air-gapped installations with no outbound connectivity at all. This is what Iterate.ai means by true AI sovereignty: the model, the data, and the audit trail all stay in one place, under one owner.

How is access controlled?

Section titled “How is access controlled?”
  • Administrative access — token-based sessions with four roles (superadmin, admin, operator, viewer), hashed password storage, and per-source-address rate limiting on sign-in attempts.
  • Inference access — bearer API keys issued per consumer, validated on every request, and revocable independently of any deployment change. Keys can be paused rather than deleted, which is useful during an investigation.
  • Sensitive value handling — a new key’s secret is displayed exactly once at creation and only a prefix is shown thereafter; an administrator can reveal a stored key, and that reveal is itself written to the audit log.

How are secrets protected at rest?

Section titled “How are secrets protected at rest?”

Stored credentials — Hugging Face tokens and revealable key material — are encrypted at rest. The threat this addresses is explicit: plaintext disclosure from a database backup, an exported row, or a decommissioned disk. It does not defend against an attacker who has already achieved code execution on the control plane, because the control plane must be able to decrypt at runtime. Deployments requiring hardware-backed key custody should run the control plane on confidential-computing infrastructure.

How is fleet communication secured?

Section titled “How is fleet communication secured?”

Every control-plane-to-node call carries a shared cluster secret, so a node agent will not accept lifecycle commands — start a server, stage a model, kill a process — from an unauthenticated source on the network. Node agents are intended to sit on a trusted internal network segment behind that check.

How is the container hardened?

Section titled “How is the container hardened?”

The image runs as a non-root user, is built multi-stage so build toolchains are absent from the runtime layer, and is based on a minimal supported Linux base. The build pipeline includes an optional CVE scan that can fail the build on high or critical findings, and images are published under a versioned tag for provenance. File-deletion operations are path-restricted to approved model directories, so a malformed or malicious request cannot reach anything else on disk.

What is audited?

Section titled “What is audited?”

Every administrative action: sign-in, sign-out, failed sign-in, and permission denials; server create, modify, and lifecycle changes; model registration, download, and deletion; API-key and credential-vault operations including reveals; user and role changes; cluster changes; configuration changes; and node registration. Records include the acting user, action, target, timestamp, and source address, and are filterable in the UI or exportable through the API for SIEM ingestion.

What is deliberately out of scope?

Section titled “What is deliberately out of scope?”

Lifeboat is an inference engine with an operational control plane, not a governance platform. These are intentional scope boundaries, each with a standard answer:

Not in Lifeboat Where it belongs
Enterprise SSO / SAML / OIDC on the control plane Front the control plane with VPN, bastion, or reverse-proxy authentication. Native SSO is on the roadmap.
Network ingress filtering and WAF Infrastructure layer — security groups, network policies, NGINX/Envoy, or a cloud WAF
Data-loss prevention, guardrails, or content filtering on inference traffic AgentWatch deployed in front of Lifeboat
Per-tenant budgets, quotas, and multi-tenant key isolation AgentWatch
TLS termination in default deployments The organization’s reverse proxy, or Lifeboat’s own TLS option when supplied a certificate and key

How does this map to compliance frameworks?

Section titled “How does this map to compliance frameworks?”

Lifeboat is deployed software rather than a service, so certification applies to the customer’s deployment and the controls around it, not to a vendor-hosted instance. What Lifeboat contributes to an audit is the technical evidence: enforced role separation, authenticated inference access, encryption of stored secrets, a complete and exportable administrative audit trail, and — most consequentially for data-residency and sovereignty requirements — the fact that no prompt, completion, or model artifact leaves the deployment boundary.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”