Your security is our priority

At CircleCI, our top concern is protecting our users’ intellectual property
and sensitive secrets such as keys, tokens, and credentials.

Compliance and Authorizations

CircleCI takes the security of your applications seriously. We partner with the top security organizations to ensure that your projects are built, deployed, and maintained securely.
FedRAMP Tailored

First CI/CD tool to meet the rigorous security and privacy NIST-standards of FedRAMP.

SOC 2 Type II Compliant

SOC 2 Type II compliance is a component of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA)’s Service Organization Control reporting platform.

Product security features

Get the compliance, security, and audit logging features that you need. Choose our cloud-hosted service with the option to use CircleCI compute and self-hosted runners, or run your own instance of CircleCI entirely on your own infrastructure.

  • Source code security

    Communication with your VCS to access source code is always encrypted over the wire using SSH and/or HTTPS.

  • Config policies

    Enforce organizational compliance and standardization across projects.

  • Environment variables (secrets)

    Protect secrets and other sensitive data in CircleCI using environment variables.

  • OpenID Connect

    CircleCI supports authentication via OpenID Connect at the job level. Using OIDC, pipelines can authenticate to systems like Vault, AWS and GCP without distributing secrets.

  • Restricted contexts

    Restricted contexts allow encrypted storage and sharing of environment variables across multiple projects while limiting access to certain user groups or at the project level.

  • Audit logging

    Use audit logs to monitor anomalies, assist in forensics, and demonstrate compliance.

  • Runtime isolation

    CircleCI runs all builds in isolated sandboxes that are destroyed after each use.

  • Console output and artifacts

    Encryption is employed over the wire using SSH and/or HTTPS for both console output and artifacts. Both are only available to those with read access to your repository.

  • Two-factor authentication

    CircleCI inherits 2FA authentication established in your third-party VCS provider.

Compliance & Certifications

Current compliance & certifications
SOC 2 Type II Compliant

SOC 2 Type II provides CircleCI with an opportunity to meet (and exceed) industry standards and gives our customer organization’s access to industry-recognized, standardized reports that they can compare across services in our space. Achieving SOC 2 Type II compliance means that CircleCI has put in place and follows the procedures and security policies necessary to reduce risks, and that their processes can be requested and audited. Learn more about SOC 2 Type II at https://www.aicpa.org/.

FedRAMP Tailored

Our FedRAMP Tailored designation demonstrates that CircleCI meets US government data security standards and is authorized for use within US government agencies. Learn more about the FedRAMP certification at https://www.fedramp.gov/.

Data Privacy Frameworks

The certification ensures that CircleCI meets all data transfer security standards for the United States, the EU, the UK (and Gibraltar) and Switzerland under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Learn more about the Data Privacy Framework at https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov/.

PCI Compliance

CircleCI leverages the PCI compliance of Stripe.

Business Practices

Personnel & Processors
Background checks

All CircleCI employees and contractors must pass a background check and sign confidentiality agreements.

Employee security awareness

CircleCI mandates that new employees attend classes covering security best practices.

Engineer security education

Engineers are required to attend an additional technical security workshop.

Policies

CircleCI maintains various security policies which are maintained and communicated by our security management team.

Partner management

CircleCI requires all partners and third-party vendors to fill out a security questionnaire. Those which handle PII are also required to sign a Data Processing Addendum.

Security incident response
Response team

CircleCI maintains a dedicated Incident Response Team.

Response policy + plan

CircleCI maintains an Incident Response Policy and Runbook to facilitate decision making during critical situations.

Communication

Network and security incidents are published at https://status.circleci.com/. At our discretion, based on the nature of a security incident, we may contact customers directly and/or publish security alert information to https://circleci.com/blog in addition to (or in lieu of) posting to our general status page.

Physical Security

Offices Security
Headquarters security

CircleCI headquarters employs 24-hour door personnel and badge access is required at all hours. Visitors are required to sign in and be escorted at all times.

Remote offices security

CircleCI’s remote offices in Denver, Japan, and London implement similar physical security controls to the San Francisco headquarters.

Fleet Security
Linux fleet security

CircleCI uses Amazon and Google Cloud Platform for its computing. Both vendors are industry leaders in security and privacy.

macOS fleet security

CircleCI operates macOS fleets housed at three data centers, located in Milwaukee, Las Vegas, and Atlanta. No CircleCI employee has physical access to the machines and all administration is done remotely. Data center engineers are the only people with access to provisioning machines, updating or deprovisioning machines. Federal regulators completed a full-day onsite audit in 2022 to assess the security, availability and integrity of the facility. Additionally, a penetration test was performed in late 2022 to identify and resolve any potential threats to the platform. Extensive badging, access logging, and other security controls are in place, all of which have been audited and approved under SOC 2 type II compliance programs at CircleCI or the data center provider.

Network & Data Security

Network Security
Vulnerability scanning

CircleCI implements a Docker-centric vulnerability scanning tool in its software development CI/CD process. Patching timelines for CircleCI’s cloud service are:
      Critical – 14 days
      High – 14 days
      Medium – 30 days
      Low – 30 days
Monthly scans are submitted to federal authorities as part of ongoing FedRAMP compliance.

Internal systems auditing

CircleCI maintains a formal Audit Policy governing application events, system events, hardware events, and physical access. This includes the what, when, and where of the event, its source, its object, its outcome, and the person associated with it.

Architecture

CircleCI’s architecture consists of multiple layers of data security including a DMZ, bastion hosts, and firewalls.

Global distribution

CircleCI’s Site Reliability, Support and Engineering teams are globally distributed for 24/7/365 coverage.

Build isolation

CircleCI runs all builds in isolated sandboxes that are destroyed after each use.

Data Security
Traffic encryption

All data in transit is encrypted via TLS and SSH.

Environment variable encryption

Environment variables are encrypted at rest and in transit, and injected into the runtime environment at the start of a job. All sensitive secrets such as keys, tokens, and other credentials should be stored as environment variables within CircleCI.

Source code encryption

Source code is always encrypted via TLS and SSH in transit, but is not encrypted at rest. Source code at rest is secured behind multiple layers of architecture security such as DMZ, bastion hosts, and firewalls.

Data Backup

CircleCI maintains a Data Backup and Snapshot Policy that requires restoration capabilities within common industry timelines.

Application Security

Secure Development
Secure coding

The Software Development Lifecycle Policy dictates delivery, review and merge processes to minimize rollbacks, downtime, design flaws and security incidents.

Site reliability

CircleCI employs a team of Site Reliability Engineers ensuring that the CircleCI application security layers are consistently maintained.

Application-level security
OWASP Top 10

CircleCI's web application is designed to withstand OWASP Top 10 matters such as injections, broken authentication and session management, cross-site scripting (XSS), insecure direct object references, missing function level access control, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), unvalidated redirects and forwards.

Application penetration testing

Third-party penetration testers are hired annually to test the CircleCI application, network, infrastructure, and new products for vulnerabilities. Coverage ranges from OWASP Top 10 to threat modeling of new product features.

Have a security concern about CircleCI?

If you find a serious security issue such as any of the following issues, please contact us with relevant details including steps to reproduce or a proof-of-concept.

  • Injection vulnerabilities
  • Authentication or session problems
  • Improper access to sensitive data
  • Broken access controls
  • Cross-site scripting
  • Anything from the OWASP Top 10 Project
  • Email spoofing, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC errors

There are some classes of bugs and common reports that we do not act on:

  • Credentials in a 3rd party's .circleci/config.yml

Upon discovering a vulnerability, we ask that you act in a way to protect our users' data:

  • Inform us as soon as possible.
  • Test against fake data and accounts, not our users' private data (please ask if you'd like a free account to work on this).
  • Work with us to close the vulnerability before disclosing it to others.

CircleCI does not have a bounty program.

We do not offer bug bounties for discovered vulnerabilities. We hope that if you discover vulnerabilities in the course of your work that you share them with us so we can improve the health of the internet ecosystem.

Report your security concerns to CircleCI.

If you have found a vulnerability in CircleCI, please contact our security team by email at security@circleci.com.

If you are reporting a sensitive issue, please encrypt your message using our security team's GPG key (ID: 0x4013DDA7, fingerprint: 3CD2 A48F 2071 61C0 B9B7 1AE2 6170 15B8 4013 DDA7)

Email security@circleci.com

Further reading

Explore how CircleCI confers security by default

Stylized cloud showing a certificate-like document from CircleCI.

Learn how to integrate secure secrets management in your CircleCI pipelines with HashiCorp Vault and OpenID Connect.

A stylized hand wields a wrench to tighten up pipelines.

Learn how to improve security for CI/CD pipelines using some DevSecOps best practices.

A guide to incorporating vulnerability management and DevSecOps into your CI/CD pipelines. Proven methods for making software security a team effort.