Is Cognocient secure? How is my data protected?

This page states only what is actually built and verifiable in Cognocient today. Cognocient is an early-stage company — we'd rather be short and accurate here than long and aspirational.

Data handling: metadata only, with one opt-in exception

Cognocient is built on a metadata-only logging principle for billing and attribution — but caching is a deliberate, disclosed exception, and we'd rather spell out exactly where the line is than make a blanket claim that doesn't hold up under a code audit:

• Prompt content is never stored, in any form other than a hash. For billing/attribution, Cognocient reads cost, tokens, latency, and your attribution headers off each call — it does not persist the prompt text itself. Where a prompt is used as a cache key, only its SHA-256 hash is stored, never the raw text.
• Response content is stored temporarily, but only if you opt into caching. Exact-match caching (X-Cog-Cache: true) and semantic caching (X-Cog-Similarity-Cache: true) return a cached response instead of calling the provider again — to do that, Cognocient has to hold onto the actual response for up to 24 hours. If you never send either header, no response content is ever stored. See Caching for the exact mechanics and TTL.
• Attribution headers are logged as sent. Whatever you put in X-Cost-Feature, X-Cost-Department, etc. is stored as metadata, so avoid putting sensitive values (customer names, ticket contents) directly into header values.
• Data retention for attribution history is 30 days past trial or subscription expiry, after which it is deleted. Cached responses expire automatically after 24 hours regardless of subscription status.

What's actually in place

• Provider API keys (the OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. keys you give Cognocient to proxy your calls) are encrypted at rest using Fernet symmetric encryption, and decrypted in memory only for the moment needed to forward a request. This applies to the proxy path specifically — the Python async wrapper never sends Cognocient your provider key at all, since it calls the provider directly from your own process. That's a different security tradeoff, not a strictly lesser one: no third-party network hop, but third-party code (the wrapper library) does execute inside your process. See the wrapper's own docs for the full framing.
• Cognocient proxy keys (your sk-cog-… key) are stored as a bcrypt hash, never in plaintext. Revoking a key takes effect immediately.
• Data isolation between customers is enforced at the application layer — every database query is explicitly scoped to your authenticated customer ID.
• Data in transit between your application, Cognocient, and AI providers is encrypted over HTTPS/TLS (1.2+).
• User sign-in and sessions run on Supabase Auth, a third-party identity provider, rather than custom-built authentication code.

Responsible disclosure

If you discover a security vulnerability in Cognocient, please report it to security@cognocient.com.

Frequently asked questions