Security at Ankra
Where Ankra sits in your trust boundary, the controls that exist today, and how to reach us when you find something. If it is not shipped, opt-in, or in progress, it is not on this page.
Where Ankra sits in your trust boundary
A SaaS control plane, an outbound-only agent inside your cluster, and Git as the source of truth between them.
- SaaS control plane
The control plane runs with us
The UI, API, and orchestration run at platform.ankra.app. It holds metadata, encrypted credentials in Vault, and the audit log - not your workloads.
- In-cluster agent
The agent runs with you, and only dials out
One agent per cluster connects outbound over NATS with per-agent JWT credentials and rotating session tokens. Nothing connects inbound - your API server is never exposed to us.
- Git
Git is the source of truth
Desired state lives in your Git repositories. The platform reconciles clusters to Git, so turning Ankra off leaves your clusters running from history you own.
- directionoutbound only
- transportNATS
- identityper-agent JWT credentials
- sessionrotating session tokens
- inboundnone
The agent dials out. Your cluster accepts nothing in.
The honest part: the agent runs with cluster-admin
The agent has cluster-admin inside your cluster - it has to, because it manages anything you ask it to, from namespaces to CRDs. We would rather tell you that plainly than bury it. What constrains that power is the operating model around it:
- Human approval on every write - drafts never reach a cluster unreviewed
- Drift guards - sync windows and prune protection constrain out-of-band change
- Lease serialisation - one operation at a time per cluster, no racing changes
- Append-only audit log the agent cannot edit or truncate
The controls matrix, as it stands today
Everything below is shipped, opt-in, or actively in progress. There is no aspirational tier - if it is not listed, we have not built it.
Identity & access
4 controlsTOTP, WebAuthn passkeys, and recovery codes on every account.
Require MFA for every member of your organisation, enforced at login.
Built-in and custom roles, with assignments scoped to cluster groups.
SSO-backed cluster credentials that expire on their own, with instant revoke-all.
API & AI surface
5 controlsSHA-256 hashes only - secret material lives in Vault, with a 90-day default expiry.
mcp:read and mcp:write are separate scopes; MCP tokens are rejected on the REST API and vice versa.
Standards-based authorisation per RFC 9728, RFC 8414, and RFC 7591.
Pattern and entropy detection runs before anything is persisted.
AI tools see key names and counts only, never the values.
Secrets & data
3 controlsPlatform secrets are stored in HashiCorp Vault or OpenBao.
SOPS with AGE, using per-organisation keys.
Encrypted secrets are decrypted inside your cluster - plaintext never transits the platform.
Audit & governance
6 controlsEvery administrative change is recorded in a log that can only grow.
Search and filter the full audit history from the platform.
CSV and JSON export of audit events.
Audit events retained for twelve months as standard.
Every AI-proposed change is human-approved and lands as an attributed Git commit.
Sync windows and prune guards catch and constrain out-of-band change.
Cluster & infrastructure
4 controlsNon-root, read-only filesystem, all capabilities dropped, seccomp enabled.
Per-agent credentials and no inbound access to your cluster.
Logs are redacted at the source, before they leave your cluster.
Scoped cloud firewalls, private networking, bastion hosts, Vault-managed SSH keys, and 15-minute join tokens.
Vulnerability management
8 controlsFleet-wide findings, per-cluster posture, and remediation priorities, powered by Trivy Operator.
Ingress and egress scored per cluster: unprotected workloads, over-broad rules, and what to tighten.
Kyverno baseline results per cluster, installed in audit mode with an explicit switch to enforce.
Installs pinned Trivy Operator and Kyverno on a cluster from a single action.
A security baseline installed by default on newly created clusters.
Accept a finding with an expiry date, and revoke the acceptance at any time.
Posture captured daily, so you see direction rather than a point in time.
Recurring reports by email, with CSV export.
Compliance
3 controlsCIS and NSA/CISA pass rates per cluster, plus Trivy configuration audit as a second axis.
An ISMS is being built against the Trust Services Criteria. Not yet audited.
CSV or JSON over a date window: posture history, dispositions with reasons, audit summary, and attestations.
The other half: securing what you run
Everything above is how we secure the platform. The Security Center is the product side of that, covering the clusters you run on it.
Image vulnerabilities, benchmark compliance, pod-security policy violations, and NetworkPolicy over-privilege across every cluster in the organisation. Findings become decisions you record once, with a reason and a review date, rather than a list that returns unchanged on the next scan.
Found something? Tell us.
We take reports from security researchers seriously and we answer them ourselves.
Report a vulnerability
Email [email protected]with what you found and how to reproduce it. We acknowledge reports within three business days, and good-faith research will not be met with legal action.
Buying Ankra?
Procurement and compliance material lives on our trust page: our SOC 2 posture, what data the control plane holds, and the sub-processors behind the platform. Product detail on every control lives in thedocumentation.
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No tickets in between.
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