How we protect your assets

When you add an asset, we issue it a unique digital certificate — think of it like a tamper-proof passport for that one piece of equipment. Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

1. The asset is given a random internal ID that contains no customer information.
2. We generate a fresh pair of strong cryptographic keys for that asset using industry-standard methods (ECDSA P-256, NIST-approved). The keys are unique to this one asset and are never reused.
3. We sign the asset’s certificate so the platform can recognise it — equivalent to a passport stamp from a trusted authority.
4. The certificate and private key are shown to you exactly once, when you add the asset. The private key never gets stored anywhere on our side. It lives on your equipment from that moment.
5. Three files install on the on-asset device: the certificate, its matching private key, and a small trust bundle so the device knows it’s talking to the real Pointnode platform (not an impersonator). A fourth file is shown for your records but doesn’t go on the device.
6. When the device connects to Pointnode, both sides check each other’s certificates. If anything’s wrong — wrong asset, revoked certificate, expired — the connection is refused.

Some Pointnode features act on equipment from a distance — for example, unlocking a crane for a Guard session, or an engineer reaching a machine’s own web interface through an Edge gateway. This is how those requests are controlled today.

• App controls go through checks first. When you use a control in the Pointnode web or iOS app, such as a Guard unlock, your browser or phone does not send the command to the equipment. It is recorded as a request by a database function, and user accounts cannot create or change command requests any other way.
• Unlocks are checked before they are accepted. An unlock is refused while the asset is locked out. It is accepted only from an operator, site manager, engineer or organisation admin of the organisation that owns the asset, or from Pointnode staff; inspectors and read-only users are refused.
• Lockouts are on the record. Issuing and releasing a lockout each write an entry to the audit log, which the database refuses to edit or delete.
• Remote access is switched on at the site. An engineer can reach equipment on your network through an Edge gateway only after remote support has been enabled on that gateway, through the gateway’s own interface. Pointnode Cloud has no way to enable it. A remote session lasts at most eight hours.
• Gateway software is signed. Edge gateway software is distributed as signed releases, and our release publishing checks each release’s signatures against our release signing keys before it is published.

We recommend that organisation admins turn on two-factor authentication (Settings → Security) and give unlock-capable roles only to the people who need them.

Records is your per-asset compliance file cabinet — statutory inspections, services, pre-use checks, ad-hoc reports. Designed so that when a regulator or insurer asks “show me everything you did on this asset”, you get a complete, tamper-evident answer in seconds.

• Audit log that nobody can edit. Creating, editing, archiving and downloading a record each write a line to the audit log. The database itself blocks edits and deletes on these lines, even for our own staff. Nobody — not your team, not Pointnode — can quietly rewrite history.
• Statutory retention, enforced. Five years for statutory inspections (LOLER, PUWER, wire rope), two years for pre-use checks — configurable per report type. Hard delete is blocked at the database; the only way to remove a record is to archive it, and archived records stay readable until their retention window passes.
• PDF attachments are protected. PDFs are served via short-lived secure links (valid for five minutes per download). Each download writes one audit-log line capturing who, what, when. Once uploaded, a PDF cannot be overwritten.
• Access scoped by role and site. Operators and site managers see only the assets at the sites they’re assigned to. Engineers and org admins see the whole organisation. These rules are enforced by row-level security in the database for requests made on your behalf. Pointnode staff accounts can reach customer data for support and operations; switching into a customer organisation writes an audit-log entry.

No advisories published. When we fix a vulnerability in Pointnode Cloud, the Edge gateway or the iOS app, we list the advisory once the fix is available to every affected customer, with the affected and fixed versions and a CVSS v4.0 severity. Customers with an affected deployment are told directly.

View all security advisories

We credit researchers who report vulnerabilities to us in good faith, with their permission. No reports have been disclosed to us to date, so this list is currently empty — we publish it anyway so the commitment exists before the first report rather than after it.

To report an issue, see our disclosure policy. Safe harbour applies to good-faith research: we will not pursue legal action against researchers who follow the policy, and you can ask to stay anonymous.