Inbound Relay is an encryption proxy that intercepts and encrypts, or redacts, selected fields and files in an HTTPS request before forwarding the request to its original destination.

Since fields are secured before reaching your server, you can collect sensitive data (like credit card numbers, SSNs, credentials or health data) from your users without ever handling it in plaintext.

Inbound Relay can be placed in front of any HTTPS API and configured within the Evervault Dashboard to encrypt or redact any fields within a JSON, XML or multipart/form-data payload.

Getting Started

Get up and running with Evervault Encryption in less than 5 minutes.

In this example, you will use Inbound Relay to encrypt and redact sensitive data. Before starting this tutorial, you'll need to sign up for an Evervault account and create an App.

Create an endpoint

To get started with Inbound Relay, you will need an API endpoint that is accessible publicly over the internet. In this example, we will use RequestBin — a free service for generating temporary API endpoints which allows you to log and inspect request and response payloads.

You can create a RequestBin by navigating to requestbin.com/r. After doing so, you will be presented with an API endpoint URL which you can send requests to.

You can send an HTTPS POST request to your RequestBin using the following cURL script:

curl https://[YOUR_REQUESTBIN_ID].x.pipedream.net/secure \
		 --request POST \
		 --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
		 --data '{"name":"Claude Shannon", "ssn":"123-12-1234"}'

If you navigate back to the RequestBin Dashboard, you should be able to see the payload by clicking the request in the log panel on the left.

Create an Inbound Relay

Now that you have a publicly accessible API endpoint, you can create an Inbound Relay. An Inbound Relay is an encryption proxy that sits between the client and server.

To create an Inbound Relay, go to the “Inbound Relay” section within your App in the Evervault Dashboard. Click the “Create an Inbound Relay” button and paste in your RequestBin endpoint URL as the target.

You’ll then be given a new API endpoint which you can send requests to. Any requests that are sent to this API endpoint will be intercepted by Evervault before being proxied to the original destination API endpoint. In the next section, you’ll configure the proxy to encrypt certain fields in the request.

If we run the previous cURL command with our new Evervault API endpoint, the request will be proxied to RequestBin without any fields having been encrypted.

curl https://[YOUR_REQUESTBIN_ID]-x-pipedream-net.relay.evervault.com/secure \
		 --request POST \
		 --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
		 --data '{"name":"Claude Shannon", "ssn":"123-12-1234"}'

Protect Your Sensitive Data

Now that you're proxying traffic through Inbound Relay, you can configure it to start securing sensitive fields.

Inbound Relay currently provides two ways to protect your data: Encryption and Redaction.

Encryption and Redaction are useful for two distinct use cases.

Encryption

Encrypted data can be decrypted at a later stage (using Functions, Cages, or Outbound Relay). This is particularly useful when receiving sensitive data that you primarily send to third-party APIs, or that you want to process using your own code.

Redaction

Relay can redact PII from specific JSON fields and replace the PII with synthetic data. Using Inbound Relay for Redaction can be particularly useful when sharing sensitive data with third-party LLMs, like OpenAI.

Inbound Relay can also unredact the data after the response is received from an LLM or other third parties. You can configure unredaction by going to Inbound Relay -> Secured Fields -> Response Body -> Unredacted Fields and entering the JSON path on the response body where Relay should find and replace the redacted data with the original values. When unredaction is configured, a map of the PII and the redacted values will be returned in a X-Evervault-Redacted header.

Encryption and Redaction Example

In the code snippet above, you are sending a name and a Social Security Number. We will configure our Inbound Relay to encrypt the Social Security Number, and redact the name.

To begin, navigate to the Secured Fields section within your Inbound Relay's page in the Evervault Dashboard. If you click on the Add Fields button in the top right of the page, a modal will appear where you can specify both the fields to encrypt, and the fields to redact.

To encrypt the ssn field, we will simply type ssn into the Encrypted Fields input. Then to redact the name, we will type name into the Redacted Fields section.

Once you have configured both fields, click the Save button at the bottom of the modal.

When you run the same cURL command as above, you will see that the request logged in the RequestBin will contain a different name in plaintext and the ssn field will be an Evervault-encrypted string. Rerunning this cURL command will produce a different name each time.

curl https://[YOUR_REQUESTBIN_ID]-x-pipedream-net.relay.evervault.com/secure \
		 --request POST \
		 --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
		 --data '{"name":"Claude Shannon", "ssn":"123-12-1234"}'

You have successfully used Inbound Relay to secure your data!

What’s next?

Any strings you encrypt using Inbound Relay can now be used across the rest of the Evervault Platform. To share it with a third-party API, you can use Outbound Relay. To process it using your own code, you can use either Evervault Functions or Evervault Cages.

Response Decryption

By default, Inbound Relay will automatically scan any responses from your endpoint and decrypt any fields containing Evervault-encrypted data. This means that any clients of your Inbound Relay will never interact with encrypted data, but your endpoint will only ever see encrypted data.

Custom Domains

Inbound Relay lets you specify custom domain names if you would prefer not to include an evervault.com hostname in your Inbound Relay’s URL. During Relay creation, simply specify your own hostname of choice. The Dashboard will then guide you through adding a custom CNAME record to point traffic to your Inbound Relay. The CNAME required will point to custom.relay.evervault.com.

If you require client IPs in your target server, you can change the CNAME to point to direct.custom.relay.evervault.com. This will append the client IP to the X-Forwarded-For header of the request.

mTLS

Inbound Relay lets you upload a client certificate to authenticate with the target server over mTLS. You can upload a client cert on the configuration page of your Inbound Relay. When mTLS is enabled, requests through that Relay will require an Evervault API Key. This can be added as an HTTP header (api-key: API-KEY...). If the mTLS cert has a password attached, it is encrypted with your team's encryption keys before being sent to Evervault's backend.

Fields to Encrypt

Inbound Relay supports several different content types. Currently, we support JSON, XML, Form URL Encoded and Multipart Form Data. When it comes to configuring your fields to encrypt, it can vary depending on what Content-Type you're targeting. JSON and XML both support JSONPath selectors for more advanced field selection deep into the objects themselves, while Form URL Encoded and Multipart Form Data only take the names of the fields to be encrypted since they are both flat structures. When you add a field to encrypt, you will be asked whether you're adding a JSON field or a Form field. JSON fields will only attempt to match on JSON and XML requests, while form fields will only be applied to Form URL encoded and Multipart Form data requests.

WebSockets

Inbound Relay supports WebSockets. Simply use your Relay hostname as the WebSocket target, and we will transparently encrypt and decrypt all client-server and server-client messages containing JSON or XML.

File Encryption

Inbound Relay supports encrypting files and text-fields in multipart/form-data uploads. Simply configure the relevant form fields in your Relay's Fields To Encrypt. Encrypted files will arrive at your server with an unchanged filename, but the bytes in the file will be fully encrypted.

For Response Decryption, Relay will scan and decrypt both multipart/form-data responses or raw file responses, e.g. image/png.

There is currently a per-request limit of 25 MB for encryption/decryption.

Alerts

Alerts allow you to see errors in Slack, Discord or sent to any webhook url of your choice. You can create an alert for your Relay inside of the Evervault Dashboard by navigating to Relay -> Alerts -> Add Alert

Webhooks

When you configure a custom webhook to receive alerts, the following fields will be in the response.

Error Codes

If you received a failed response from Relay that included an X-Evervault-Error-Code header or if you received a JSON response with an evervault-error-code field in the case of programmatic access, you can use this Relay error code reference to help resolve the issue.