Founder's plain-language security FAQ template for AI-native SaaS

Reusable 8-section plain-language security overview a founder hands to a worried friend, customer, or investor reviewing an AI-native SaaS. Covers encryption, network isolation, authn/MFA, rate limits, skill-marketplace integrity, autonomous recovery, GDPR, and infrastructure trust — each section is one paragraph of concrete decisions, not policy boilerplate.

Founders shipping a product that gives an AI agent sudo-equivalent access take a wave of security questions. A neutral plain-language template removes the 1–2 hours of bespoke writing per inbound and gives investors a structured artifact to compare against.

1. Start from the verbatim 8-section template below.
2. For each section, swap product-specific names (recovery agent, skill-quarantine service) for your own equivalents.
3. Adjust the rate-limit numbers (login, checkout, expensive endpoints) to what your stack actually enforces — these are the most-questioned lines.
4. List your exact frontier-model failover chain in the autonomous-recovery section; don't generalize.
5. Keep the GDPR section concrete: data-export format, deletion grace window, reactivation.
6. Save as a Notion or Google Doc; link from your sales deck and your investor data room.

🔐 [Company] — Security Overview

1. Data Encryption
• At rest: Google-managed Compute Engine disk encryption on all VM boot disks
• In transit: HTTPS/TLS 1.2+ everywhere
• Secrets: All API keys, private keys, webhook secrets stored in GCP Secret Manager (never in env files or code)

2. Network Isolation
• Every user VM lives in a private VPC subnet with no external IP — can't be reached directly from the internet
• Dashboard (Cloud Run) talks to VMs only over the internal GCP network
• SSH uses OS Login with ephemeral Ed25519 keys that expire after 5 minutes

3. Authentication & Access Control
• Firebase Auth — email/password, Google OAuth, Apple Sign-In
• MFA — SMS and TOTP
• reCAPTCHA v3 on email login
• Session cookies httpOnly, secure, sameSite=lax
• RBAC: regular users vs admins; full admin audit log

4. Rate Limiting
• Login: 5 attempts / 15 min per IP
• Checkout: 10 req/min per user
• VM provisioning: 3 req / 5 min per user
• "Ask AI to fix": 3 requests/hour per user

5. Skill Marketplace Security
• Every skill AI-audited before listing
• SHA-256 checksums on all skill code
• External/community skills go to a quarantine intake before review
• A privileged recovery agent can revoke and propagate removal across all VMs instantly

6. Recovery Agent — Autonomous Repair
• Monitors all customer VMs every 5 minutes
• If a VM is unhealthy, an AI agent (GPT 5.4 → Gemini 3.1 Pro → Claude Opus 4.6) SSHes in autonomously and fixes it
• Full audit trail in agent-session + agent-turn tables

7. GDPR / Data Privacy
• Data export — users download all their data as ZIP
• Deletion scheduling — 30-day grace, then hard delete via cron
• Account reactivation available within grace

8. Infrastructure Trust
• Runs entirely on GCP
• Destructive admin ops require multi-step confirmation via messaging channel

• The template will leak vendor-specific subsystem names if you copy without scrubbing. Do a pass to replace every named subsystem (recovery agent, quarantine intake, audit-trail tables) with your own equivalent, or describe the function generically. The whole point is plain language — readers will assume named tooling exists in your stack.