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Holding a customer's provider key without ever holding it

Bring-your-own-key is an encryption problem before it is a product feature.

4 August 2026 · By Priya Raman, Security · 6 mins

A tenant hands you their Anthropic key. From that moment you are holding a credential that can spend their money, and every place it lands is a place it can leak.

Envelope encryption with a per-tenant context is the shape: the key is sealed on write, the wrapping key never leaves the KMS, and the plaintext exists only inside a callback that lasts one request.

The parts people skip are the boring ones. `toJSON()` throws. `toString()` returns a mask. The resolved cache is in-process and never Redis, because Redis persists to disk, replicates over a network, and shows up in `MONITOR`.

A cold instance paying one KMS decrypt is the price, and it is a good price.

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