Overview
Airlock is a self-contained transfer gateway for disconnected and air-gapped systems. It moves approved, cryptographically signed artefacts across the boundary — but only ever in one controlled direction per appliance, never as a general-purpose two-way bridge. On an import appliance, the connected node collects and quarantines the external artefacts an isolated environment needs (threat feeds, datasets, software updates, model weights), serves only signed bundles, and a receiver inside the enclave pulls and verifies each one before it is promoted. On an export appliance the flow reverses: the enclave signs narrowly-scoped, approved results and pushes them out, and the connected node independently re-applies export policy before anything is published. Direction is fixed when the appliance is built — it cannot be switched at runtime.
Why we built it
The hardest problem at an air gap isn’t keeping data out — it’s letting the right data cross without quietly opening a route the other way. 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 moves approved, signed artefacts in one governed direction 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, in either direction.
Design principles
- The enclave initiates. Every transfer is started by the high side — a pull on import, a push on export — and the connected node can never open a connection inward.
- One direction per appliance. Import and export are separate builds, chosen at build time and enforced by the appliance image. There is no bidirectional appliance and no runtime switch.
- Verify before acting. Every bundle is checked independently of transport before it is trusted — the receiver verifies imports before promoting them; the connected node re-applies policy to exports before publishing them. The same check holds whether it travelled 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 or out. Never a two-way bridge.
Airlock’s core is built and proven: the transfer, signing and verification model runs across both import and export directions today. We’re now hardening it toward production — the sealed appliance image, collectors and formal hardware qualification — and we’d welcome conversations with organisations who need exactly this.
Grappling with moving data across an isolated boundary — in either direction? We’d be glad to talk it through — where Airlock is heading, and how we approach the boundary problem today.
Get in touch