WorkOS Vault: Advanced Encryption for Sensitive Data

Securing sensitive data is more critical than ever. With breaches and cyberattacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, businesses need robust solutions to protect their most valuable information. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of WorkOS Vault, our new state-of-the-art platform designed to provide top-tier encryption and, optionally, secure storage for sensitive data.

Developers no longer need to be experts in cryptography or encryption key infrastructure to add security to their apps. WorkOS Vault simplifies key generation and envelope encoding by handling them behind the scenes, allowing you to focus on basic CRUD operations and relevant metadata in your application code.

Whether you need to protect passwords, API keys, OAuth credentials, customer PII, or credit card numbers, WorkOS Vault is built to safeguard your information with industry-leading encryption standards. It empowers businesses to easily encrypt and optionally store their sensitive data through an intuitive interface and simple API.

Why did we build WorkOS Vault?

Data security in web applications is no easy feat. Despite its importance, there’s a noticeable lack of support for encryption in many popular frameworks. This gap leaves developers to navigate complex security concerns on their own. The challenge is compounded when working with multi-tenant database architectures, which often treat all data as equal. In reality, however, some data is far more sensitive and valuable than others, demanding a more nuanced approach to encryption and access control.

While encryption techniques have been around long before the advent of modern computing, integrating them into web applications still comes with significant complexity. Developers are tasked with more than just implementing encryption—they must also set up key management infrastructure, select from a variety of key generation algorithms, decide how to partition keys across different data types or customer tenants, and integrate encryption libraries into their application code. This process can quickly become overwhelming, especially for teams without deep expertise in cryptography.

For SaaS companies, the need for strong security is even more pressing. Enterprises trust SaaS providers with their most sensitive data, and as data breaches continue to make headlines, the stakes have never been higher. Cloud computing is ubiquitous, and the responsibility for protecting sensitive information has shifted squarely into the application layer.

WorkOS Vault was built to address these challenges and empower companies to protect their customers' data with ease, ensuring that encryption and key management are no longer barriers to secure and compliant applications.

What is WorkOS Vault?

WorkOS Vault is an advanced key management orchestration system (EKM) designed to simplify the complexities of secure data encryption and storage. It adds an extra layer of security by assigning different encryption keys to individual pieces of data. This means that even if one key is exposed, not all of the data will be at risk. It works similarly to the practice of using different passwords for different websites instead of one for all. Segmentation minimizes the risk in case of exposure. So, Vault works like a (highly sophisticated) password manager for all the different encryption keys you have for each piece of sensitive information you have saved. All this is wrapped in a very simple API with CRUD operations for encrypted objects. You no longer need dedicated infrastructure teams or special software, just an SDK you can easily integrate into your app.

WorkOS Vault integrates seamlessly with both public cloud Key Management Services (KMS) and enterprise Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to securely generate, manage, and store root encryption keys. This hybrid approach ensures that you can leverage the security of cloud providers or on-premises solutions, depending on your organization's needs and compliance requirements.

One of the key innovations in WorkOS Vault is its metadata-based data key generation. Rather than requiring developers to manually track key IDs for specific tenants or users, Vault automatically leverages the existing context around your data—such as tenant identifiers or user-specific information—to generate or share encryption keys. This approach simplifies key management while ensuring that sensitive data is protected with the correct level of security.

Depending on their security needs, developers can choose whether to encrypt data on the client side or in the cloud. Vault’s SDKs allow for client-side encryption, ensuring that data is encrypted without ever leaving the developer’s system, providing an additional layer of security. Alternatively, Vault’s storage API can encrypt and securely store data in WorkOS, offering best-in-class availability and durability.

How does WorkOS Vault work?

WorkOS Vault offers a suite of APIs designed to cater to a variety of use cases, providing flexibility and control for developers integrating encryption into their applications. These APIs are engineered to simplify the process of managing sensitive data, ensuring that encryption and key management are as seamless and efficient as possible.

One of the core components of Vault is its storage API, which provides a key-value store backed by an EKM for managing encryption keys securely and storing encrypted data with maximal durability. Key generation is automated and based on the metadata provided by the developer, so there’s no need for manual tracking or complex configurations. To ensure data integrity and consistency, all key-value pairs are versioned, allowing for strong consistency and high availability, even in the event of failures. You can control the entire lifecycle of each encryption key using the Vault API: from initial generation, to rotation, to re-encryption (i.e., reset), to revocation.

For developers who need more granular control over encryption, Vault also offers a key generation API. This lower-level functionality allows developers to retrieve context-specific encryption keys directly from the EKM for use within their own application code. This enables precise and tailored key management strategies for different data types, tenants, or use cases, giving developers the flexibility they need without compromising security.

To optimize performance, all of WorkOS Vault’s APIs are designed with resource efficiency in mind. This makes encrypting and decrypting data a cost-effective process, saving developers on compute and infrastructure costs while maintaining high levels of security. By offloading the complexities of encryption management to WorkOS Vault, developers can focus on building their applications without worrying about the overhead of managing encryption at scale.

Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) for Ultimate Data Control

BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) is a security model that allows customers to use their own encryption keys instead of relying on the default keys provided by a cloud service provider or third-party vendor. It provides an added layer of control, transparency, and security, as the organization is not reliant on a third party to manage access to its most sensitive information.

With BYOK, organizations have full control over the encryption and management of their sensitive data, ensuring that only they can access the encryption keys used to protect it.

In a typical BYOK setup, a business can generate and store its encryption keys within its own infrastructure or through an external key management system (KMS) and then upload those keys to the service provider's platform. This approach is often used to meet specific compliance and security requirements, as it ensures that even the cloud service provider cannot decrypt the customer's data without access to the customer's own key.

WorkOS Vault supports this use case and integrates directly with AWS KMS, GCP KMs, Azure Key Vault, and Hashicorp Vault.

Data Revocation and Cryptographic Deletion

One of the key features of WorkOS Vault is the ability to easily revoke access to data or perform cryptographic deletion. In many scenarios, you might need to remove sensitive data—like an encrypted email address—that has been stored across multiple systems. Normally you would have to go through the complex and often error-prone process of manually deleting the data from each system.

With WorkOS Vault, you can simply delete the encryption key that was used to secure the data. Since the data is encrypted with that key, deleting the key effectively renders the data inaccessible, without the need to delete it from each location where it resides. This provides a powerful and streamlined method of revoking access or ensuring that sensitive data is completely unreadable.

This cryptographic deletion approach adds another layer of control, ensuring that organizations can quickly and securely remove sensitive information when needed, without risking data fragmentation or incomplete deletions. Whether you’re managing access permissions or adhering to data retention policies, this feature gives you a simple, scalable solution for securely controlling your encrypted data.

Auditability: Full Transparency and Control

When dealing with sensitive data, visibility and accountability are paramount. That’s why WorkOS Vault includes robust auditability features designed to give you full insight into how your data is being accessed. We maintain a comprehensive trail of events, recording every action taken on both the encrypted objects you store and the keys we generate. This audit log provides an accurate record of all activities, ensuring that you can always verify that your data is being handled securely and in accordance with your policies.

Our auditability features go beyond just tracking changes to the data itself. Since access to encrypted data is governed by the encryption keys, you also gain visibility into who is accessing these keys. Each time a key is read or used to decrypt data, it’s logged, creating a clear record of who accessed the key and when. This serves as an additional layer of transparency, acting as a proxy for access to the data itself, so you can be confident that only authorized users are interacting with your encrypted information.

These features not only help you maintain strong security controls but also provide an essential tool for compliance and investigation, allowing you to trace any actions back to their source and ensuring full accountability at every step.

Get Started with WorkOS Vault

Getting started with WorkOS Vault is simple. Sign up today and start protecting your sensitive information with our powerful encryption solutions. Our easy-to-use platform and intuitive API are designed to help you integrate top-tier security into your app without the hassle.

Secure your data with WorkOS Vault — because your business and your customers deserve the best protection.