Security

Pretense sits between your AI coding tool and the model it talks to. Secrets and personal data are swapped for stand-ins before the request leaves your machine, and swapped back when the answer returns. This page describes that guarantee precisely, including where it stops.

The guarantee: mutation, not deletion

Pretense never one-way redacts, and it never passes a detected secret through untouched. At egress, every detected value is replaced with a stand-in; on the way back it is restored. Reversal is byte-exact or it is a bug. Because the swap is reversible, the model still sees a coherent, well-formed request and your tooling still receives the real values — you are not trading accuracy for safety.

Every request takes the same path

The proxy mutates each request on the way out and restores it on the way back, so the round trip happens on every call rather than on a path you have to remember to opt into. The audit log records what was swapped, request by request, so you can confirm the outbound side rather than take it on trust. See how it works for the mechanism in detail.

What stays on your machine

Detection, mutation and reversal all run locally. The mapping that lets a stand-in be turned back into the original value stays on your machine — it is not uploaded, and without it the stand-ins are inert. Scanning a file and reversing a mutation are local operations and are not metered.

Air-gapped mode

On the Enterprise plan, Pretense can run against a model on a runner you control, over loopback, so your prompts and code never leave the machine at all. Air-gap fails closed: without a valid licence every request is refused rather than quietly falling back to a hosted provider. That refusal is correct behaviour, not a fault.

Being explicit about the limit, because it is the kind of detail that matters in a review: air-gapped means your prompts and code stay local. It does not mean the CLI never opens a socket. Installing it uses the network, signing in uses the network, and usage counts are reported unless you turn them off — including for a request that was refused. Setting PRETENSE_USAGE_REPORT=off stops that, and a machine with no route out at all can import its licence instead of fetching it. The full procedure is in the air-gap guide.

Audit trail and compliance presets

Pretense ships policy presets for HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST and PCI. A preset re-weights how severely findings are scored for that framework so the audit trail reflects the standard you are working to. To be unambiguous about what that is and is not: a preset is a scoring profile and an audit trail. It is not a certification, and using one does not make a deployment compliant on its own.

Certification status

Audit trails are available today. Formal SOC 2 and HIPAA certification are in progress and are listed as coming soon on the Enterprise plan. We would rather say that plainly here than let a badge on a marketing page imply an attestation that has not been issued. If your procurement process needs the current status in writing, ask and we will send it.

Reporting a vulnerability

Email security@pretense.ai with steps to reproduce and anything needed to assess impact. This is the same address the customer agreement names for reporting unauthorized account use or a security incident. Give us a reasonable window to ship a fix before disclosing publicly, and please do not run testing that degrades service for other customers or touches data that is not yours.

For anything else — a security questionnaire, an architecture review, or a question this page did not answer — get in touch.