Security

Infrastructure credentials

The default configuration ships with weak, well-known passwords for PostgreSQL, MinIO, and Redis. Replace them with strong, unique values before exposing Tracecat to production traffic.

# PostgreSQL
TRACECAT__POSTGRES_USER=tracecat
TRACECAT__POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<strong random password>

# Temporal PostgreSQL
TEMPORAL__POSTGRES_USER=temporal
TEMPORAL__POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<strong random password>

# MinIO / S3
MINIO_ROOT_USER=<strong random user>
MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=<strong random password>

# Redis — add a password and update the URL
REDIS_URL=redis://:<strong random password>@redis:6379

For Redis, also pass the password to the container. Add a command override in your docker-compose.yml:

services:
  redis:
    command: ["redis-server", "--requirepass", "<same password as above>"]

In production, prefer managed services (e.g., Amazon RDS, ElastiCache) over self-hosted PostgreSQL and Redis: they handle encryption at rest, automated backups, and credential rotation.

Platform secrets

Tracecat requires four cryptographic secrets, plus an optional keyring if you enable Temporal payload encryption.

Secret	Protects
`TRACECAT__DB_ENCRYPTION_KEY`	Fernet key for credentials and sensitive settings stored in PostgreSQL.
`TRACECAT__SERVICE_KEY`	Service-to-service JWT signing.
`TRACECAT__SIGNING_SECRET`	Webhook URL signing and HMAC operations.
`USER_AUTH_SECRET`	Password reset tokens, email verification, OAuth state, the MCP OIDC issuer keypair, and the internal OIDC client secret.
`TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_KEYRING`	Versioned keyring for Temporal payload encryption. Optional. Tracecat reads it only when `TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_ENABLED` is true.

Tracecat requires four secrets. Generate them with openssl:

# Service key (hex, 32 bytes) — used for internal service-to-service JWT signing
openssl rand -hex 32

# Signing secret (hex, 32 bytes) — used for webhook URL signing and HMAC operations
openssl rand -hex 32

# User auth secret (hex, 32 bytes) — used for password reset, email verification, OAuth state, and OIDC key derivation
openssl rand -hex 32

# DB encryption key (Fernet-compatible base64, 32 bytes) — used for encrypting secrets at rest
openssl rand 32 | base64 | tr -d '\n' | tr '+/' '-_'

Store these securely. Losing TRACECAT__DB_ENCRYPTION_KEY makes encrypted credentials unrecoverable. Losing TRACECAT__SIGNING_SECRET invalidates existing webhook URLs and agent channel endpoint URLs.

See Where to store them for the recommended storage on each deployment target, and which of these secrets can be rotated.

Temporal payload keyring

TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_KEYRING holds a JSON keyring rather than a single key. Each entry maps a key ID to a root secret, and current_key_id selects the key that encrypts new payloads:

{"current_key_id": "v1", "keys": {"v1": "<root secret>"}}

Generate each root secret the same way as the other secrets:

openssl rand -hex 32

Tracecat derives a separate AES-256-GCM key per workspace from the root secret, and stamps the key ID into every payload it encrypts. That stamp is what lets you rotate the keyring while older histories stay readable. On AWS, supply TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_KEYRING_ARN instead, and Tracecat fetches the keyring from Secrets Manager at runtime.

Where to store them

Keep these out of your application configuration and out of version control. Use the mechanism your platform already provides.

Deployment	Recommended storage
AWS ECS Fargate	AWS Secrets Manager. Pass secret ARNs to Terraform; ECS resolves the values at task launch, so they never appear in your `.tfvars`.
Kubernetes	External Secrets Operator syncing from your secret manager, or an existing Kubernetes Secret you create out of band.
Docker Compose	A `.env` file on the host. Restrict it to the service account that runs Tracecat and exclude it from version control.

On Kubernetes, prefer External Secrets Operator over a hand-created Secret. Your secret manager stays the source of truth, the operator re-syncs values rather than copying them, and no plaintext passes through a shell history or a manifest. Reserve chart-managed secret templates for pipelines that encrypt values at rest with Sealed Secrets or SOPS.

Rotation

Rotation support differs by secret. Check the differences before you plan a rotation window.

TRACECAT__DB_ENCRYPTION_KEY cannot be rotatedTracecat encrypts under a single Fernet key with no re-encryption path. Changing it makes every stored credential unrecoverable, and there is no migration to re-key existing rows. Treat this key as permanent for the life of the deployment: back it up, and control access to it at least as tightly as the credentials it encrypts.

Secret	Overlap window	Rotation procedure	Blast radius
`TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_KEYRING`	Yes	Add the new key to `keys` and let every service pick it up, then point `current_key_id` at it. Keep retired keys as long as you retain their histories.	None for existing histories, which stay readable under the key they were written with. Between the two steps, a service still on the old keyring cannot decrypt payloads written under the new key. In ARN mode that gap lasts up to `TEMPORAL__PAYLOAD_ENCRYPTION_CACHE_TTL_SECONDS`.
`TRACECAT__SIGNING_SECRET`	No	Rotate, then reissue every affected URL.	Every webhook URL and agent channel endpoint URL. Breaks in-flight Slack OAuth installs, and pending Slack approval buttons for up to 24 hours.
`TRACECAT__SERVICE_KEY`	No	Restart every service that holds it in one window, including `ui`, which uses it for the SAML ACS proxy.	While services disagree, in-flight agent turns fail their next tool or LLM call, executor calls fail, and service-to-service requests return `401`. Miss `ui` and SSO login breaks.
`USER_AUTH_SECRET`	No	Restart `api` and `mcp` together.	Active MCP access tokens (1-hour lifetime), and in-flight password reset and verification links. Sessions are database-backed, so users stay logged in. MCP refresh tokens are hashed and survive.

Isolation

Tracecat executes user-defined Python scripts, custom actions, and agents inside the executor service. You choose between nsjail isolation and no isolation. Defaults differ by deployment target.

Deployment	Default
Kubernetes	nsjail sandbox. The chart applies the required security context to the executor pods.
Docker Compose	No isolation. `TRACECAT__EXECUTOR_BACKEND=direct`.
AWS Fargate	No isolation. Fargate cannot grant the capabilities nsjail requires.

nsjail sandbox (recommended for production)

For production, enable nsjail — a process isolation tool from Google that enforces:

Filesystem isolation — scripts reach only their job directory and explicitly mounted paths. The host filesystem stays invisible.
Resource limits — nsjail caps CPU time, memory, file size, and process count per execution, so a runaway script cannot starve the host.
User namespace separation — scripts run as unprivileged users even when the container runs as root.
Network access — scripts keep network access, since they need to reach databases, APIs, and S3, but nsjail confines it to the container’s network namespace.

To enable nsjail, set the following in your .env:

TRACECAT__EXECUTOR_BACKEND=nsjail

The legacy ephemeral value remains an alias for nsjail.

The direct backend does not sandbox ordinary workflow actions. Set TRACECAT__EXECUTOR_BACKEND=nsjail for supported action isolation.

nsjail requires:

Linux with kernel 4.6+
Docker privileged mode or CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability on the executor container
The nsjail binary and sandbox rootfs (included in Tracecat images)

nsjail is not supported on macOS or Windows. Use the direct backend on those platforms.

Resource limits

When you enable nsjail, agent sandboxes get a cgroup v2 memory budget shared by their child processes. Python scripts and custom actions use a per-process virtual address-space cap.

Sandbox	Memory cap	Configure with	CPU time	File size	Processes
`core.script.run_python` and custom actions	2048 MB	`TRACECAT__SANDBOX_DEFAULT_MEMORY_MB`	300 s	256 MB	64
Dependency installation for `core.script.run_python`	2048 MB	Fixed	300 s	256 MB	64
Agents	4096 MB	`TRACECAT__AGENT_SANDBOX_MEMORY_MB`	Agent timeout ceiling	256 MB	128

Pass TRACECAT__SANDBOX_DEFAULT_MEMORY_MB to your action executor and TRACECAT__AGENT_SANDBOX_MEMORY_MB to agent-executor. Docker Compose forwards the agent settings; Kubernetes deployments must add them to the agent executor container. Agent sandboxes also have a per-process address-space guard (rlimit_as), defaulting to twice the memory budget: 8192 MiB with the default 4096 MiB budget. Set TRACECAT__AGENT_SANDBOX_ADDRESS_SPACE_MB=16384 to override it with 16 GiB. Size this guard above your workload’s peak virtual size, since runtimes can reserve address space before using RAM. Stdio MCP connection probes use the same policy with a memory budget capped at 1024 MiB. Agent nsjail requires a writable cgroup v2 subtree with the memory controller enabled. The Compose sandbox overlay starts python -m tracecat.agent.sandbox.cgroup as root to prepare the container’s subtree, then drops privileges to apiuser before starting the worker. Other deployments must use that bootstrap with an isolated, writable container cgroup namespace, or delegate a subtree and set TRACECAT__AGENT_SANDBOX_CGROUP_PATH=/sys/fs/cgroup/agent-sandboxes. The worker rejects missing delegation before accepting activities. Set concurrency so all sandbox budgets plus worker overhead fit within the outer container limit. Tracecat does not resize concurrency automatically. A per-sandbox limit cannot prevent a container OOM when the sum of concurrent workloads exceeds that outer limit. For Python scripts and custom actions, the memory setting still controls rlimit_as per process. Python can raise MemoryError at this limit; native runtimes can abort. Tracecat reports an action or agent run that exceeds the memory, CPU time, or file size limit as sandbox.resource_limit_exceeded. The failure is attributed to the workload, is not retried, and the error names the env var that controls the cap. Two limits fall outside that guarantee. Exceeding the process count fails process creation inside the sandbox with an ordinary error instead of killing the workload, so it surfaces as whatever the script or agent does with that error. Dependency installation is reported as a package installation failure whichever limit it hits. These limits apply only when nsjail is enabled. Without it Tracecat installs no rlimits, so a failure of the same shape is reported as an ordinary workload or platform failure.

No isolation

Without nsjail, scripts, custom actions, and agents run as regular subprocesses in the executor. This is a supported production configuration when you trust everything that runs. That means your own workflow and custom registry code, the third-party dependencies those actions install, and the agents, tools, and MCP servers you enable. Review that code and pin those dependencies as you would any code with direct access to your systems. Choose nsjail instead when you run code you have not reviewed, such as untrusted third-party packages or agents that generate and execute their own code.

Choosing a backend

Backend	Isolation	Latency	Use case
`direct`	Does not support sandboxing	~50ms	Trusted code, dependencies, and agents
`nsjail` (`ephemeral` alias)	nsjail sandbox (cold per action)	~4000ms	Untrusted code, dependencies, and agents

Authentication

Docker Compose deployments default to basic email/password authentication. For production, configure OIDC or SAML SSO. See Roles and permissions for the roles you assign to users and groups once they can sign in.

TLS

Never run production traffic over plain HTTP. See TLS and certificates for Caddy-based automatic TLS setup, custom certificates, and trusting internal CAs.

See Architecture for the platform and AI agent trust model.

Overview

Building automations

Resolve cases

Building agents

Building custom integrations

Self-hosting

Manage platform

Authentication

Security

Infrastructure credentials

Platform secrets

Temporal payload keyring

Where to store them

Rotation

Isolation

nsjail sandbox (recommended for production)

Resource limits

No isolation

Choosing a backend

Authentication

TLS

​Infrastructure credentials

​Platform secrets

​Temporal payload keyring

​Where to store them

​Rotation

​Isolation

​nsjail sandbox (recommended for production)

​Resource limits

​No isolation

​Choosing a backend

​Authentication

​TLS

​Related pages

Infrastructure credentials

Platform secrets

Temporal payload keyring

Where to store them

Rotation

Isolation

nsjail sandbox (recommended for production)

Resource limits

No isolation

Choosing a backend

Authentication

TLS

Related pages