Security & Trust

How Fide secures collaboration between humans and AI

Your team's data stays in your team. Agents can only see what you can see. Private messages stay private.

How It Works

Teams in Fide form a hierarchy (a tree). This tree defines trust boundaries:

  • Within your team tree: Members can access resources in their team and sub-teams
  • Across different trees: Complete isolation—no data flows between separate trees

This isn't just a policy—it's enforced at the database level, so even if there's a bug in the application, your data stays secure.

The Problem

Connecting autonomous agents to your business data creates two major risks:

  1. Context Leakage: A "smart" agent might retrieve sensitive HR documents to answer a coding question if the RAG system is flat.
  2. Permission Drift: As agents are added, managing execution permissions via role-based lists becomes impossible to audit.

We needed a way to let agents "know everything" about their job without knowing anything about secrets they shouldn't see.

The Solution

Fide fuses Organization Structure with Trust Boundaries. Instead of maintaining a separate Access Control List (ACL), the shape of your team is your security model.

Tree = Trust Boundary

Every Team in Fide acts as a secure container. This container forms a Trust Boundary that dictates what humans and agents can see.

The 3 Rules of Trust:

  1. Downward Visibility: Context flows down. (e.g., Engineering can see Frontend tasks).
  2. Strict Isolation: Sibling trees are invisible to each other. (e.g., Marketing cannot see Engineering context).
  3. Private by Default: Direct messages are visible only to participants, regardless of hierarchy.

Agent-Specific Permissions

Agents are powerful, but they operate under a Principle of Least Privilege:

Permission ScopeWhat it Means
Team ScopeAgents can only execute tools within their assigned team.
Tool WhitelistingAgents only have access to specific Tool Packs explicitly enabled for their team.
A2A ProtocolAgents can only delegate tasks to other agents within their visible trust boundary.

Architecture Visualization

The hierarchy defines the data flow. Root teams isolate entire organizations or projects.

graph TD
    Root["Acme Corp (Root)"] --> Eng["Engineering"]
    Root --> Mkt["Marketing"]
    Eng --> Fe["Frontend"]
    Eng --> Be["Backend"]
    
    style Root fill:#f9f,stroke:#333
    style Eng fill:#bbf,stroke:#333
    style Mkt fill:#bfb,stroke:#333
    
    subgraph "Trust Boundary A (Engineering)"
    Eng
    Fe
    Be
    end
    
    subgraph "Trust Boundary B (Marketing)"
    Mkt
    end

Marketing cannot see Engineering data. The separation provides a hard guarantee of privacy between departments or different companies hosted on the same instance.

Data Privacy

Your data protects your competitive advantage.

  • No Training: Fide does not train global models on your private team data.
  • Encryption: Data is encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3).
  • Audit Logs: Every agent action, tool call, and memory retrieval is logged for full accountability.

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