Shared responsibility model

Security outcomes in Ethen depend on decisions made by the platform, the customer, and the external services selected for a workload. This page separates those duties so an administrator can identify who must configure, review, or remediate a particular boundary.

The division below is operational rather than contractual. Provider terms, customer obligations, and Ethen commitments require legal review where they affect liability, privacy, retention, or service guarantees. The current implementation also contains unresolved production setup work, so responsibilities should be confirmed for the deployed environment rather than assumed from a route or interface.

Ethen responsibilities

Ethen is responsible for the behavior implemented within its application and server boundaries. That includes validating supported inputs, keeping server-only values out of ordinary client responses, rejecting known placeholder configuration, applying documented product-specific policy checks, and returning errors that do not unnecessarily expose internal details.

Where Ethen stores or queries data, the application should enforce the ownership and authorization rules defined for that store. The repository includes Supabase-oriented server modules and schemas, but production projects, migrations, RLS coverage, identity bridging, backup configuration, and data ownership still require deployment verification.

Ethen also owns the accuracy of product state labels. A sample audit view must stay labeled Sample. Demo-only billing must not be presented as payment processing. An unavailable metric should remain unavailable instead of being replaced with an estimate that appears authoritative.

These responsibilities do not extend to guarantees that are absent from the implementation or approved policy. Ethen does not currently document universal route authentication, complete enterprise federation, fixed retention windows, immutable audit export, or a formal incident-response SLA.

Ethen also owns secure defaults within the code it ships. A server route should reject malformed input before invoking a provider, avoid returning raw secrets, and distinguish an unavailable backend from a successful operation. Where a product is intentionally preview, sample, fixture, or demo-only, the interface and documentation should preserve that label.

Configuration helpers are part of this responsibility, but they are not the whole control. Detecting a placeholder Supabase value is useful; ensuring that a production project exists, migrations are applied, RLS is correct, and service credentials are restricted remains a deployment task. Ethen must avoid presenting the helper’s result as broader assurance than it provides.

Customer responsibilities

Customers decide who may use their deployment and what information may be submitted. They are responsible for maintaining authorized access, protecting account and provider credentials, selecting appropriate external providers, and confirming that submitted data can lawfully and contractually be processed.

For BYOK and connector workflows, the customer chooses the provider account and supplies the credential. That choice can affect data handling, retention, training, regional processing, rate limits, and incident response. Review the provider’s current terms before sending sensitive content.

Customers must also scope repository and project access correctly. Sentinel should be used only for repositories the customer owns or is explicitly authorized to assess. Project routes should not be treated as proof of organization isolation; administrators need to confirm actual ownership and access behavior in the deployed backend.

Operationally, customers should keep an inventory of credentials, know which users can change configuration, review approval requests before execution, and retain incident details such as request IDs or trace IDs when those identifiers are available.

The customer should assign accountable owners for identity, providers, credentials, projects, policies, and incident coordination. Those owners need enough context to make decisions without sharing sensitive values unnecessarily. For example, an approver may need the proposed action, affected resource, provider, and expected side effect, but not the raw provider key.

Access should be removed when a person no longer needs it. Because a complete enterprise membership and automated recertification system is not established, administrators cannot assume that an organization-wide process will reconcile every product automatically. Review sign-in access, project membership, provider accounts, and local devices as separate surfaces.

Provider responsibilities

External providers control the infrastructure and policies used after Ethen sends a request to them. Depending on the product, a provider may process model prompts, media, voice data, connector calls, or other customer content. Provider availability, retention, training policy, deletion behavior, and regional processing are governed by the provider’s current service and the customer’s account configuration.

A configured provider credential indicates that Ethen may be able to authenticate to that service. It does not establish that the provider supports every model or modality, that a request will be accepted, or that the provider offers zero retention or zero training.

Provider failures also sit outside Ethen’s direct control. A route may reject a request because the provider is unavailable, the customer account lacks access, a credential has expired, or the provider has changed a policy. Ethen can expose status and error information where implemented, but it cannot turn an external dependency into an internal guarantee.

Provider responsibility begins only after the request reaches that provider. Ethen remains responsible for selecting the route it claims to select and for not exposing the customer credential through its own responses. The provider is responsible for authenticating the supplied credential, enforcing account entitlements, executing the supported service, and applying its own operational and data policies.

A provider may return partial, delayed, or ambiguous failures. Customers should preserve the Ethen request identifier together with any provider identifier that is returned. That pairing helps determine whether the failure occurred before routing, during provider execution, or after a provider response was received.

Configuration

Responsibility becomes concrete through configuration. Use the following questions before enabling a sensitive path:

Avoid relying on a single green status indicator. Configuration readiness, authorization, provider access, and persistence should be validated separately.

Evidence

Responsibility reviews need evidence that identifies both the action and its boundary. Useful records may include configuration-readiness results, request or trace identifiers, selected provider, policy outcome, approval state, actor identity, and the storage source for the record.

Evidence quality varies. A fixture entry demonstrates a UI shape; it does not prove a customer event occurred. A type definition shows an intended state; it does not prove the state is persisted. A route path proves navigation exists; it does not prove access control or durable ownership.

For each review, classify evidence as live, bridged, fixture, sample, demo-only, or unavailable. Note the subsystem that produced it and whether the data can survive a restart or deployment. This prevents a private-alpha or preview record from being used as if it were a production audit trail.

Boundary examples

A provider key is exposed. Ethen owns any application behavior that improperly returns or logs the raw value. The customer owns revoking the affected provider credential and evaluating which account was exposed. The provider controls revocation propagation and any account-level investigation.

A user reaches a project route. Ethen must enforce whatever route and data authorization the product claims. The customer must confirm membership and ownership in the deployed environment. The existence of /projects/[projectId] alone does not establish tenant isolation.

A policy requires approval. Ethen is responsible for halting the supported action at that decision point. The customer decides who may approve and whether the proposal is appropriate. Current approval persistence and separation of duties remain under review.

A log is requested for an investigation. Ethen should identify whether the displayed data is live, fixture, or unavailable. The customer should preserve relevant request identifiers and avoid treating sample audit entries as incident evidence.

A provider processes sensitive content. The customer selects the provider and reviews its terms. Ethen should avoid sending data beyond the configured route and should not claim provider retention or training behavior that has not been verified.

A Supabase-backed route is deployed without reviewed RLS. Ethen owns the route logic and any documented authorization behavior. The deployer owns applying migrations, configuring the project, and verifying RLS and service-role usage. Supabase operates the configured backend according to the customer’s account.

A preview approval card is clicked. Ethen must not represent the action as a durable decision if the surface is scaffolded. The customer should not use the visual state as an authorization record. Any downstream provider remains responsible only for actions that actually reach it.

A local endpoint is configured on another machine. Ethen should display the configured endpoint accurately. The customer must verify network trust and data destination. The runtime operator controls the remote process and its model storage.

Responsibility handoff worksheet

A handoff should name the control owner before an issue occurs. The following fields are sufficient for most deployment reviews without creating an unsupported enterprise workflow:

• Capability: the route or product being enabled.
• Data class: the information that can enter or leave the capability.
• Ethen control: validation, authorization, policy, redaction, or status behavior implemented in the product.
• Customer control: identity, project ownership, provider selection, credential custody, or approval decision managed by the customer.
• Provider control: account entitlement, execution, infrastructure, and provider policy.
• Failure owner: the party that can take the first corrective action.
• Evidence source: the record that can confirm what happened and whether that record is live, bridged, fixture, or unavailable.

For a Gateway BYOK route, for example, Ethen validates the supported request and uses the configured provider route; the customer owns the provider account and credential; the provider authenticates the key and processes the request. An authentication error may require the customer to revoke or replace the key, while a malformed Ethen response belongs to the application boundary.

The worksheet should be updated when a route changes maturity, a provider is added, or storage moves from a local or fixture source to a durable backend. A responsibility statement written for a preview surface can become misleading after the underlying execution path changes.