Between October 6 and October 21, 2026, seven companies disclosed incidents that ended the same way: their customers' keys in someone else's hands.
- Fireworks AI, October 6
- Tensorlake, October 8
- Zeabur, October 14
- OpenCode, October 16
- OVHcloud, October 19
- Railway, October 20
- LiteLLM, October 21
Some were platform breaches. Some were poisoned releases. Every one ended with keys taken from the machines that were using them.
What it cost
Zeabur reports 3.2 million secrets stolen, and the platform is shutting down. Railway says 100,000 workspaces' secrets were at risk, even though they were encrypted. OpenCode users report more than $1,000 in rogue AI charges on a single account.
And one stolen cloud key can run up $46,000 a day, by Sysdig's worst-case estimate.
Why encryption didn't help
Railway's secrets were encrypted. It didn't matter, and it couldn't have. Your app needs the key in memory to use it, so whatever your app can decrypt, an attacker with root can decrypt too.
The usual fixes all hit the same wall:
- Encrypt it. Your app decrypts it. So can they.
- Put it in a vault. Your app fetches it. So can they.
- Rotate it. Your app keeps it for 90 days. So do they.
As long as the key is in your app's memory, root can read it.
Take the key out of the app
That's what we're building. With Seal, the key lives in a hardware TEE, a sealed part of the chip that even root can't look inside. Your app holds only a blob that works from your app, to one destination, and nowhere else.
An attacker who takes over your server finds the blob. They can copy it, but it opens for no one else.