4. Security & Privacy

How Metaustral protects your data — and why we never need to touch it.

4.1 Metadata-Only Architecture

Metaustral is a metadata catalog, not a data warehouse or a data lake. It never reads, stores, copies, or processes the actual content of your databases — only structural information (schema definitions): table names, column names, data types, and relationships.

Your data stays in your infrastructure When Metaustral connects to a database, it reads only schema definitions (CREATE TABLE statements, column types). No SELECT queries are ever executed on your data rows.

This means:

No customer records, financial data, or PII ever leaves your systems.
Metaustral remains useful even when your databases contain sensitive or regulated data (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX).
You can safely connect production databases — the catalog only learns what columns exist, not what values they hold.

4.2 Workspace Isolation

Every organization on Metaustral gets its own completely isolated workspace. There is no shared data layer between tenants.

Data isolation: catalog assets, connections, users, and audit logs are all scoped to your workspace. No other organization can see or access them.
Access control: only users explicitly invited to your workspace can log in. Each user has a role (Admin, Editor, or Viewer) that controls exactly what they can do.
No cross-tenant queries: every API call is authenticated and scoped to a single workspace at the database level — not just at the application layer.

4.3 Encrypted Credentials

When you save a database connection in Metaustral, the password is encrypted with Fernet symmetric encryption before being written to disk. Fernet uses AES-128-CBC under the hood and is a well-audited, industry-standard encryption scheme.

Passwords are never stored in plain text.
The encryption key is stored separately from the database, in the server environment configuration.
Even if the database were accessed directly, connection credentials would be unreadable without the key.

4.4 On-Premise Agent Security

For organizations that cannot expose their databases to the internet, the On-Premise Agent runs entirely within your private network. Only outbound HTTPS traffic to Metaustral's API is required — no inbound ports need to be opened. Database credentials remain local on the agent machine and are never transmitted to the cloud.

Related pages Audit History → — full log of every change in your workspace. Users & Roles → — control who can access what.