How we protect your certificates

All certificate files (.p12, .cer, .key, .pem) are stored encrypted with AES-256-GCM following a two-tier key model: each file gets its own data encryption key (DEK), wrapped by a key encryption key (KEK) managed in AWS KMS. Certificate passwords are encrypted before being written to the database — not hashed, because they must be used operationally to load certificates.

AlertaCert supports biometric access keys (Face ID, fingerprint, Windows Hello) as a second factor of authentication. Access keys are resistant to phishing by design — they are never transmitted to the server.

High-risk actions — revealing password, downloading certificate, deleting, signing documents, managing members — require recent re-authentication. If your session is old, you will be asked to confirm your identity before proceeding.

Each organization has administrator and member roles. Members cannot invite users, change roles, delete customers, or cancel signing flows. Administrators control exactly which permissions are sensitive in their organization.

Each sensitive action — upload, download, password reveal, signing, deletion, role change — is logged to an audit log. The log has no INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE policy for any user or administrator: only the service client can append entries. Log entries are hash-chained — each entry includes the hash of the previous one, making silent tampering detectable.

Upload, download, signing, and authentication endpoints have rate limits per user. Excessive attempts are blocked before reaching the database.

Each database table has RLS (Row-Level Security) enabled. One organization's data is inaccessible from another organization's queries, even if the same database instance is used. Service-role keys are stored in secrets management, never in application code, and rotated regularly. Storage file URLs are signed with short-lived expiry windows and served through a server-side proxy — never long-lived or publicly guessable.

Each uploaded file is validated by magic bytes before storage. A file that is not valid DER/PKCS12 or PEM is rejected. No arbitrary files disguised as certificates are ever stored.