Nuklear Security
At Nuke From Orbit, you grant us access to / permission over some of the most sensitive things in your life like your name, bank cards, social media, emails, mobile number and Apps.
Given that we hold such personal information about you, we think it’s important for you to know we take security as seriously as you’d expect us to. Maybe even more so.
You can break our security credentials down into five sections:
How much data we store
Our data protection ethos starts with the principle of data minimisation – the less information we store, the less there is to protect. You’ll notice in our account creation process we don’t ask for your postal address as we simply don’t need it. We’ll ask you to enter it when adding a card to your account so we can verify it with the issuer, but it’s never stored. The same is true when it comes to adding card information – you give us all the details on it which we need to verify it with your bank, but we only retain the last 4 digits of the long number and the expiry date (which can’t be used for payments) in our databases.
For other assets like your Apps and accounts, we will only store a token that is returned by the third party. Again, this token has no value on its own and can only be used to secure your accounts later.
How we store your data
Nuke stores your data on our servers at Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading providers of cloud computing globally. AWS is of course ISO 27001 compliant. Nuke uses AWS automated data backup, web application firewall, vulnerability management, DDoS protection and intelligent threat detection features.
Your data is always encrypted, at rest and on-disk, using an industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm. Multiple availability zone failover is in use for both database and compute services. This combination of best practices ensures your data is protected and persistent.
Additional layers of encryption are in use within our databases where possible. Some information that we need to be able to quickly look up, such as your email address, will have the standard protection of on-disk encryption and authorisation controls.
Sensitive information, such as the last four digits of your card numbers, and the access tokens we store for third party services, are two-way encrypted. Passwords are salted and one-way encrypted according to best practice.
How we transmit your data
You’ll note that our website and APIs (Application Programme Interfaces) exist on the .app domain, which is the first ‘secure only’ domain and means every page we show is delivered over HTTPS (the industry standard for secure web pages). Information is encrypted in-transit between our servers and your devices via TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2 and 1.3.
We’ve taken extra steps like adding DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to our domain (which prevents malicious DNS servers pointing our domain away from our servers) to ensure every page you see on https://nuke.app is served by us.
When you’re adding a card to Nuke, we need to see the full details of the card. These are securely sent to your card issuer in real-time and they respond to us with a unique token that links to your card on their system.
Your card details are never stored in our database or log files. Tokens are unique strings of 32 to 64 characters, that are absolutely no use to anyone o anything outside of Nuke and your card issuer – they can only be used by us to tell your card issuer to cancel that card.
Design, access control & policies
Technical security is only one facet of keeping your data private. The best systems can be laid bare if the human element and processes are not up to standard. Indeed some say that technical security has reached such a level when done well that human vulnerabilities are the main threat.
The good news is that as a modern application, written from scratch in 2023, we have been able to incorporate security as one of our core design principles. While this is often a facet of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, it serves a good purpose for software as well. When considering how we would build Nuke From Orbit, we knew that we wanted to have certain things, such as a low surface area for attack, a stripped back feature set that would largely place us outside the crosshairs.
We started by making the conscious decision that Nuke wouldn’t be able to do anything ‘positive’, meaning you can’t order a new bank card or reset your password. You can only cancel a card that you’ve registered or change the password on an account to something unknown. These actions mean there is no value to an attacker in targeting Nuke for financial gain.
Next, we looked at how the Nuke service could be compromised to prevent it from protecting your finances. It is conceivable that an attacker that has access to your phone could attempt to gain access to your Nuke and delete your cards, accounts and connections, or change your emergency PIN. To prevent this, all card deletes and edits are ‘soft’, meaning it takes a full seven days for a card delete to happen, and if you change your emergency PIN, the old one is still active for seven days (as well as the new one). This ensures you have time to use Nuke before a criminal can disable it.
Having made sure that Nuke will perform when called into action, we turned out attention to our, very small, internal team. Some of them, especially the technical members, have complete access to our databases and systems, so if their credentials were compromised, the attacker would have the ability to cause serious problems.
To mitigate this we use as much security as we can. All staff have very long and complex passwords, use 2FA and for some instances we lock activity to specific IP addresses. We also ensure that staff user credentials are rotated every 6 months (passwords and digital keys) to prevent any stale details sitting around.
Finally, we know that Nuke is going to be an ever-changing application and the threats of today aren’t the threats of tomorrow. Our raison d’etre is based on the premise of an evolving threat landscape.
We have devised a range of processes and protocols that allow us to handle various scenarios from code deployment, hosting changes and database replications in a secure and repeatable manner. For obvious reasons we can’t detail what these processes are, but they are built to industry standards and beyond.
Audits & certifications
While we are confident we are taking every precaution with your information, we don’t expect you to take our word for it. Nuke is in the process of achieving certification to ISO 27001 standard for information security by a UKAS Accredited certification body, and achieving SOC2 certification thereafter.
Depending on where you are in the world, one of these will be your gold standard for IT security, and being certified to both standards gives our customers the highest possible reassurance their data is in safe hands. Achieving these certifications is not straightforward and requires a constant and continual emphasis on your application’s securit and helps us keep up with an ever-changing environment.
As if all the above wasn’t enough, we also use a third party penetration testing service to make sure nothing in our code can be exploited by bad actors. A combination of routine scans and emerging threat checks ensures we are quickly notified in the event that Nuke becomes vulnerable, whether due to a new threat or an accidental regression.
Conclusion
So there you have it, this is how we’ve put your data’s security at the very heart of all we do at Nuke. We know being secure is a journey, not a destination, so we’ll keep watching, testing and evolving to ensure your information is always in safe hands.