Security & confidentiality
You'd be putting real business secrets into Pileless — contracts, finances, customer messages. Here's how Pileless is designed to reduce the risk of exposure.
The one thing most customers care about
Your files do not live in Pileless. They stay in your own storage bucket; Pileless works from short-lived references, never permanent copies. A Pileless-side incident doesn't hand over your document repository — your documents aren't here.
The short version
Your agents send Pileless approval requests — they don't have to trust us with your files. Documents stay in your cloud, access is scoped, and every action is logged. If Pileless disappeared tomorrow, your files would still be sitting in your own bucket.
Your files never sit on our servers
Every file in a decision lives in your own Cloudflare R2 storage bucket, not ours. Connecting a bucket is required before your agent can send a file, so a customer document never lands on Pileless infrastructure in the first place. We reach your files only through short-lived, single-purpose links that expire, and we never hold a permanent copy. That keeps your documents out of the blast radius of any Pileless-side incident. Text-only decisions need no bucket.
Your workspace is walled off from everyone else's
Every database query is authorized against your workspace on the server before any data is returned — access is never trusted from browser-side permissions alone. Another customer (or their AI) can't address your data.
Least privilege, by default
People and AI assistants start with zero access and get only the exact fields you grant. Sensitive content is stripped out on our server before it's ever sent — it can't be revealed by tampering with the app on the other end. An agent can be told "a high-sensitivity legal approval is blocking you" without being allowed to read the contract.
Hardened against the usual leak paths
- SSRF guards: outbound fetches are blocked from reaching private/internal destinations, and redirects are validated.
- Signed webhooks: outbound deliveries are signed so your receiver can verify they genuinely came from Pileless.
- Scoped, expiring, revocable share links — a link that leaks isn't permanent open access; you can kill it.
- Rate limiting and input sanitization against probing and injection.
What happens if…
| Scenario | Result |
|---|---|
| Pileless is compromised | Your files aren't here — they stay in your bucket. Access links are short-lived and single-purpose. |
| An agent API key leaks | Revoke and reissue it. Keys are stored hashed, so they can't be read out of our database either. |
| A share link leaks | Links are scoped and expiring — revoke it and it's dead. |
| Someone spoofs a webhook | Deliveries are signed; your receiver rejects anything we didn't send. |
| Another customer guesses your IDs | Server-side workspace authorization returns nothing. |
Logged, and encrypted
Every access is recorded in an append-only audit log — the product has no path to edit or delete an entry, so tampering would be evident on review. Your agent API keys are stored hashed (we can't read them back); your BYOC cloud credentials are stored encrypted at rest; all traffic is encrypted in transit.
Where data lives, and for how long
- Residency: decision metadata and audit records live on Cloudflare infrastructure, encrypted at rest. File contents stay in your own bucket, in whatever region you chose.
- Retention: decisions and audit records are kept for the life of your workspace — an audit trail is only useful if it's complete. Files are yours: delete them from your bucket any time; we hold references, not copies.
- Export & deletion: you can export your workspace data, or have all of it deleted, on request.
- Recovery: the database has automated point-in-time recovery at the provider layer, so an operational mistake on our side doesn't become your data loss.
Being straight with you
We're an early product and won't pretend otherwise:
- Your files always live in your own cloud, never ours. The decision routing (the question, your answer, and the audit trail) lives in our encrypted database (Cloudflare) under the isolation above. A regulated/enterprise tier that puts even that in your cloud is on the roadmap.
- We don't have SOC 2 today. Rather than asking you to trust a badge, the architecture keeps your files in your own cloud from day one — reducing what Pileless could expose at all. Third-party testing and SOC 2 are on the roadmap; in the meantime we're glad to do a security walkthrough or sign an NDA/DPA with you directly.
The defenses above are live in the product today.