Threat model

Selective Share can help to mitigate some of the factors in your business or product’s threat model.

Protected items

The three main items that can be protected are:

  1. User data
  2. Service infrastructure
  3. Access to third party services

The motivation for paying particular attention to these three items include:

  1. For user data:
    • It is a legal requirement due to privacy laws such as GDPR. Compromised user data could lead to law suits and fines.
    • Customer trust demands it. A compromise will erode trust in your business leading to financial losses.
  2. For service infrastructure:
    • Your income depends on a smooth running service. Compromised credentials may impact its availability which may lead to financial losses.
    • Internal documents and data may reside on the infrastructure. If the infrastructure is compromised this information could be leaked, damaging the business.
  3. For access to third party services:
    • Attackers could use your own services suscriptions to damage your business reputation.
    • Subscription services are expensive. Compromised credentials will allow an attacker to incur expenses on your account.

It all boils down to protecting your business against damage. Damage which, in extreme situations, may threaten its survival.

Attack surface

Selective Share can reduce the attack surface by preventing application secret compromises in the following situations:

  • Leaking application secrets due to honest mistakes.
  • Leaking application secrets by using insecure channels like email and instant messaging platforms for sharing credentials between developers.

Threat agents

Selective Share implements client-side encryption with standard GPG to protect application secrets. This should be sufficient against the following threat agents:

  • Script kiddies
  • Hobbyists
  • Opportunists
  • Partial protection against commercial spying, depending on the attacker’s budget.

Out of scope

The service is not intended to protect your business’ association with Selective Share, in other words, if our data becomes known to unauthorised or unintended parties, the fact that your use Selective Share’s service may become known. Please see page on privacy.

The service is not intended to protect against

  • targeted attacks,
  • forced errors, or
  • staff with malicious intent.

The service does not protect against nation states or other entities with similar budgets and resources.

Selective Share does not protect against your infrastructure providers. They will always have access to your data residing on their servers.