Security
Data flow
Written for someone whose job is to disbelieve it. Every claim here has a mechanism, and most are checkable without asking us.
What Garboard reads
The infrastructure code in repositories you explicitly connect, via a GitHub App with least-privilege scopes. Changed files at the head SHA of a pull request, and a full read when you scan a repository.
What it stores
Facts, not code archives: parsed resources, conventions with file-and-line evidence, findings, and review history.
We do not resell your code or derived data, train on it, or share it. Disconnecting a repository stops all processing; you can request full deletion at any time.
What it never has
No cloud credentials. There is no AWS role, no OIDC trust relationship, no provider account. This is not a permission we decline to exercise — there is nothing in the binary that could use one. It is checkable from the App’s permission grant in about five minutes.
Outbound calls
A self-hosted install makes outbound calls in exactly three cases, and every one is off by default or under your control:
| Call | When | How to avoid it |
|---|---|---|
| Embedding provider | Only if you configured a hosted embedder | The default (hash) is offline |
garboard schema sync |
Only when you run it | Do not run it; the cache is pinned |
| Anthropic API | Only if you set a key, for prose and fixes | Do not set a key; the gate is unaffected |
The deterministic gate makes none of them. Parsing, conventions, findings, evidence and blocking all run with no network and no key. garboard scan with the network off is the one-minute version of this proof.
If your deployment also sets an observability endpoint, that is a fourth egress path on the deploy side. It is worth listing in your own review even though the binary does not read it.
What we hold as a hosted service
The hosted service is currently an early-access environment. It holds what a self-hosted install holds, under our operational control rather than yours. If your evaluation requires the data to stay in your boundary, self-hosting is the answer, and it is an Enterprise plan.
Certifications
Winch Labs does not hold SOC 2, ISO 27001, or any other formal certification as a company. We say so plainly rather than implying otherwise.
Gate findings are tagged, conservatively, with CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark v3.0.0 and SOC 2 control mappings in SARIF and JSON output — a rule with no defensible mapping ships untagged rather than stretched. That is evidence toward a control an auditor already cares about. It is a different claim from being certified, and neither substitutes for your own audit of us.