How Ma’atara secures your connection

Every connection to a Ma’atara service is HTTPS, and the response tells your browser to insist on it for the next two years and to refuse a plain-HTTP fallback (an HSTS policy with preload). Traffic between your device and Ma’atara’s edge is encrypted in transit.

The page itself is restricted in what it is allowed to do: a Content Security Policy lists the exact set of origins a page may load a script from or connect to, so an unrelated script cannot be smuggled in and quietly start talking to a different server. Clicking cannot be hijacked by an invisible overlay (framing is refused outright), and the page cannot reach your camera, microphone or location.

Signing and key operations run as WebAssembly inside your browser tab, using the same post-quantum algorithms described in ‘How identity works here’. That is different from a server holding your key, but it is also different from a hardware security key: your browser tab is a general-purpose environment, not a sealed device built for one job.

Ma’atara publishes its own assessment of that gap rather than leaving it implied: browser-based signing is suitable for the consumer use this product is built for, but it is not recommended for a threat model that includes a nation-state adversary or someone dedicating real resources to attacking your specific key. The concrete risks are the ones any browser-based crypto has — timing and cache side-channels in principle, secret material that cannot be perfectly wiped from browser memory because of garbage collection and JIT compilation, and the JavaScript-to-WebAssembly boundary itself as extra surface. None of these are unique to Ma’atara; they are properties of running cryptography in a browser at all.

What this means in practice: for personal notes, everyday provenance claims and most business use, this is a reasonable trade for not needing extra hardware. If you are protecting something where a well-resourced, targeted attacker is realistically in your threat model, treat browser-based signing as insufficient on its own and look at hardware-backed alternatives — which is exactly what Ma’atara’s own security documentation recommends.