Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

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Overview

Enclave’s DLP engine scans file content at upload time and applies a configurable action — warn, block, or quarantine — based on the sensitive-data patterns it finds. Policies are managed from Organization → DLP.

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Enabling DLP

DLP has three enforcement postures, chosen by an Owner or Security Officer on the Policy tab: Choose Selected org units to adopt DLP for part of your organization without forcing it on everyone.

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Scan mode

Turning on server-side mode requires a one-time acknowledgment that the server will read the plaintext of your server-decryptable content to scan it. This does not weaken your Zero-Knowledge or ZK-Strict rooms — those are never scanned. You are re-prompted to acknowledge whenever server-side scanning is re-activated after being turned off.

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Org-unit overrides

Under the Scope tab you can layer per-org-unit overrides on top of the tenant posture:

• In Tenant-wide mode, an override tightens or disables DLP for a specific unit.
• In Selected org units mode, an override is how you opt a unit in.

The most-specific scope wins when several apply.

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Scope precedence

When a file is uploaded by a user in Org Unit B, a child of Org Unit A:

1. Org Unit A’s policy applies, then Org Unit B’s (child overrides parent)
2. Then any user-level override (most specific)
3. With no override, the tenant posture decides

If a parent policy has Lock downward enabled, child scopes cannot override it.

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Patterns

Patterns are the signals DLP looks for. Enclave ships built-in patterns for common sensitive data types: Add one or more patterns to a policy. The policy triggers if any selected pattern is found at or above the confidence threshold.

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Confidence threshold

Each pattern match carries a confidence score (0.0–1.0). The policy only triggers if the match confidence meets or exceeds the minimum confidence setting (default: 0.8). Lowering the threshold increases sensitivity but also increases false positives. Raising it reduces false positives but may miss some content.

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Actions

When a pattern is detected above the threshold, the policy applies one of four actions:

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Quarantine

Quarantined files appear in the DLP dashboard under Security → Policies → DLP → Quarantine. Each quarantine record shows:

• File name and size
• The pattern(s) that triggered the quarantine
• Confidence score
• Upload timestamp and uploader identity
• Reason (content policy violation or file size limit)

Security officers can release a file (making it accessible to the original uploader) or permanently delete it.

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Oversized file quarantine

Files that exceed the platform’s configured maximum file size are automatically quarantined with reason oversized_file, regardless of DLP pattern content. The size limit is set by platform administrators in deployment configuration.

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Lock downward

When Lock downward is enabled on a policy, child Org Unit scopes cannot create a policy that is less restrictive. This ensures that a department-level “Block” cannot be overridden by a team-level “Allow”.

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Download re-inspection (egress)

DLP normally runs once, at upload. Optionally, Enclave can re-inspect content at download time for external (federated) downloads — useful for catching content that violates a policy which was tightened after the file was uploaded. This is enabled per deployment with the DLP_INSPECT_ON_DOWNLOAD environment variable (off by default). When on:

• The check reuses the plaintext already decrypted for watermarking, so it adds no extra key-management or text-extraction cost — only the pattern scan.
• A blocking verdict stops the download and records a dlp_download_blocked audit event; warn/allow verdicts let it through.
• It fails open: if the scan cannot complete, the download proceeds (an infrastructure hiccup never blocks an already-authorised, in-policy download).
• Zero-Knowledge files are never re-inspected — the server holds no plaintext.

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Scanned documents and images (OCR)

Text-based files are extracted for free with the built-in engine. Image files and scanned PDFs with no text layer require OCR (AWS Textract), which is billed per page. Because OCR is the most expensive part of the pipeline, it is governed by explicit cost controls (deployment configuration):

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Audit trail

All DLP events — detections, blocks, quarantines, reviews, releases, and download blocks — are written to the immutable audit log with the file ID, triggering pattern, confidence score, and acting user.