Exa Security and Data Boundary

Overview

Threat-model Exa credentials, query intent, retrieved web content, generated output, and retained operational evidence as separate trust boundaries. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Exa is SOC 2 Type II certified and offers enterprise controls such as Zero Data Retention and HIPAA enablement. HIPAA mode is request-scoped, supports only eligible Search and Contents cache-only retrieval, and rejects summaries or live freshness. Regional access restrictions can yield Cloudflare block pages rather than Exa JSON.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.