Answer target
How do I answer the security questionnaire when my product holds customer credentials?
Updated June 25, 2026
Short answer
A credential-focused security questionnaire comes down to six questions: where the credential is stored, what can read it, how it is scoped, how it is rotated, what happens at offboarding, and what evidence you can show. Answer each one plainly at the maturity level you are actually at: an encrypted column in your app database, a vault you built in-house, or dedicated custody infrastructure. Reviewers accept honest answers with evidence more readily than vague reassurance.
What to do now
Prepare a plain answer for each of the six rows before a reviewer asks. Answer at the level you are at, not the level you wish you were.
- Where is the credential stored, and how is it encrypted?
- What can read it, and under what identity?
- How is access scoped per customer and per component?
- How is it rotated, and what happens at offboarding?
- What evidence, such as logs, can you show?
Better pattern
Write the answer bank once and keep it current. A reviewer trusts a specific answer with evidence more than a certification logo. Name the store, the encryption, the reader identity, the scope boundary, the rotation path, the offboarding step, and the log.
Avoid
Avoid answering the custody question with your intake flow, claiming an agent or component never sees the credential when it does, promising guarantees you cannot produce evidence for, and describing a roadmap capability as if it shipped.
Example
If you store customer keys in an encrypted column today, say so, describe the key management, and show the access log. That honest answer clears more reviews than an evasive one that a follow-up question will unravel.
The six rows of a credential questionnaire
A security reviewer holding your product to account for customer credentials tends to ask the same six things: where the credential is stored, what can read it, how access is scoped, how it is rotated, what happens when a customer offboards, and what evidence you can show. Answer these six and most questionnaires are covered.
- Where stored: the system and its encryption.
- What can read it: the human or component identity, and the boundary.
- Scoping: per customer, per project, per component.
- Rotation: how a credential is replaced without downtime.
- Offboarding: how access ends when a customer leaves.
- Evidence: the log or record that proves the above.
Level 1: an encrypted column in your app database
The honest answer at this level: credentials sit in an encrypted column in the product database, encrypted with a managed key, read by the application under its own identity. Scoping is by application logic. Rotation means the customer supplies a new value. Offboarding deletes the row. Evidence is your application logs. This is a real, defensible answer for an early product, as long as you state it plainly rather than dressing it up.
Level 2: a vault you built in-house
At this level, credentials live in a separate store with its own access control, read by named services rather than the whole application. Scoping is enforced by the vault, not just app logic. Rotation and revocation are first-class operations. Offboarding revokes the customer's grants. Evidence is the vault's access log. The trade is ongoing maintenance: you now own the custody system, its failure modes, and its audit surface.
Level 3: dedicated custody infrastructure
At this level, a purpose-built custody layer stores each credential encrypted, grants each component or agent only what it needs, resolves values at runtime, and records every access including denials. Scoping, rotation, revocation, and offboarding become configuration rather than code you maintain. Evidence is a per-grant access record. The questionnaire answers get shorter because the system was built to answer them.
Turn the answers into a reusable answer bank
Whichever level you are at, write each row down once and keep it current. A reviewer moves faster through a specific, honest answer with a log attached than through a page of reassurance. The answer bank also shows you where the weak row is, which is usually scoping or offboarding.
Practical workflow
- 1Map your six rowsWrite the current honest answer for stored, read, scoped, rotated, offboarded, and evidence.
- 2Mark your maturity levelDecide whether each row is at encrypted-column, built-vault, or dedicated-custody maturity.
- 3Attach evidenceFor each row, name the log or record a reviewer could check.
- 4Fix the weakest rowUsually scoping or offboarding. Close that gap before the next questionnaire.
Encrypted column vs Dedicated custody
Frequently asked questions
What are the core questions in a credential security questionnaire?
Where the credential is stored, what can read it, how access is scoped, how it is rotated, what happens at offboarding, and what evidence you can show. Prepare a plain answer for each.
Is an encrypted database column an acceptable answer?
For an early product it can be, provided you state it honestly: the encryption, the reading identity, the scoping, and the logs. Reviewers accept a clear answer more readily than a vague one. The risk is understating the blast radius.
Should I describe roadmap features to pass a review?
No. Answer for what ships today. Describing a planned capability as if it were live is the fastest way to fail a follow-up question and lose the reviewer's trust.
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Where ScopeHold fits
ScopeHold is the level-three answer for the credential rows. It stores customer credentials with KMS-wrapped envelope encryption, grants each agent or component only what it needs with expiry and revocation, resolves values at runtime through scopehold run, and keeps a denial-inclusive access record. It does not issue compliance certifications, and it does not proxy traffic so that a component never sees the value; be precise about both when you answer.