Overview
Airlock is a self-contained import gateway for disconnected and air-gapped systems. It lets an isolated environment pull in the external artefacts it genuinely needs — threat feeds, datasets, software updates, model weights — without ever creating a general-purpose bridge back out. A connected node collects and quarantines approved material and serves only cryptographically signed bundles; an offline signer, in a separate trust domain, decides what may be published; and a receiver inside the enclave pulls each bundle, verifies it independently of how it travelled, and only then promotes it for use.
Why we built it
The hardest problem in an air-gapped environment isn’t keeping data out — it’s letting the right data in without quietly opening a route back. We first proved the pattern as a feature inside Apex and referenced it in Tessara’s integration model, then kept meeting the same need everywhere: a boundary that imports approved, signed artefacts and nothing else. So we made it a standalone product with its own protocol, appliance image and lifecycle — Apex and Tessara are simply consumers of it, and so is anyone else who needs the same guarantee.
Design principles
- The enclave initiates. The high side pulls; the connected node exposes read-only access and can never open a connection inward.
- Verify before promote. Every bundle is verified independently of transport before anything is trusted — the same check whether it arrived over the network or across a hardware data diode.
- Separated trust domains. The connected node never holds a signing key; signing happens offline, in its own controlled environment.
- No phone-home. No SaaS, no cloud control plane, no telemetry, no licence check. A deployed site can run indefinitely with no vendor connection.
- Immutable, recoverable appliance. Production configuration ships as a signed, per-site image; updates are signed, transactional and recoverable.
- Content-neutral. One protocol carries vulnerability feeds, datasets, release artefacts, container images or model weights — unknown content fails closed.
Airlock
Approved data in. Nothing else out.
Airlock is early — the core transfer, signing and verification model is built and working in the lab, while the hardened appliance, collectors and hardware qualification are on the roadmap. It isn’t a production appliance yet, and we’d welcome conversations with organisations who face exactly this problem.
Grappling with getting data into an isolated environment? We’d be glad to talk it through — where Airlock is heading, and how we approach the boundary problem today.
Get in touch