> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs2.growthbook.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Security

> How GrowthBook handles data security: what we store, what stays in your warehouse, and how to avoid exposing PII in client-side targeting.

GrowthBook is built with security in mind, and we have made architectural decisions to ensure that your
GrowthBook instance can be as secure as possible. You can read about some of our internal security practices
[here](https://www.growthbook.io/security) and on [GitHub](https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook/blob/main/SECURITY).
This document covers some of the security considerations for administrators when setting up and using GrowthBook.

## Data Security

GrowthBook only stores account information for your users with GrowthBook accounts (email and name).
For feature flagging, evaluations typically happen within the SDK, so none of your user’s information
is sent to GrowthBook. For experiment reporting, we connect to your data warehouse to pull the
assignment/exposure and metric information. This data remains in your data warehouse; GrowthBook only
stores the aggregate results, such as the total number of users exposed to each variation and other
statistical information. No PII is stored or transferred to GrowthBook with the experimentation reports.

There are some ways where personal information may be stored or exposed with GrowthBook. If you are using
GrowthBook on the client side of your application, the rules about how each feature will be exposed to your
users are publicly accessible by inspecting network requests. Usually, these rules contain no personal
information, but if you are targeting a specific user or set of users, then this information may be visible
to malicious users. If you use GrowthBook on the server side, this information is not exposed to the client.
For these reasons, targeting based on PII when using GrowthBook client side is not recommended.

If you have to target based on PII on the client side, GrowthBook has some ways to make this secure. You
can use hashed attributes, where the values are hashed before sending, or you can use encrypted attributes,
where the payload is encrypted before sending to the client. Keep in mind that encrypted SDK endpoints will
have to decrypt the payload before use, and that means if you are using GrowthBook client side, a malicious
actor can see the decrypted payload. You can enable encryption when setting up the SDK, and you can select
an attribute as 'hashed' when creating the attribute.

Finally, to avoid these issues, you can also use 'remote evaluations' to evaluate flags based on sensitive
information without exposing it, even on the client side. With remote evaluations, the SDK will send the
user attribute to your server (or ours), and then that attribute is matched against the rules, and then the
state of the feature is returned without revealing the targeting rules to the client. The downside of this
approach is that each evaluation requires a network request to evaluate the feature, which can slow down
your application.

## Data Access

GrowthBook requires read-only access to your data warehouse. This connection information is kept encrypted.
You can use permissions to help protect access to your data warehouse through the GrowthBook UI. You can
assign users who can edit the connection info, SQL queries for the assignment, or metric queries.

Data sources can also be scoped to projects to help isolate access to your data warehouse. You can adjust
the permissions so that only users who have access to the project and have the proper permission levels
can edit those queries. If you require more separation of your data and metrics within GrowthBook, you
can create separate cloud organizations, or run GrowthBook in multi-tenant mode (available when self-hosting
as part of GrowthBook Enterprise). With this, you can have separate GrowthBook organizations running from
one GrowthBook instance. Each organization will have its own data source, metrics, and users. There is a
super-admin account type that can manage users across organizations.

## Infrastructure Security

GrowthBook Cloud is hosted on AWS, in a multi-tenant environment. We use industry-standard security to
ensure that your data is secure. If you require additional security, we also offer self-hosted options.
When you self-host, no data leaves your infrastructure. We do have anonymous usage tracking enabled by
default, but this can be disabled (see [self-hosted](/self-host)).

## Self-hosted deployments

GrowthBook can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. If self-hosting, we recommend that you keep GrowthBook behind a
firewall, and accessible via a VPN. See [self-hosting](/self-host) for more information. GrowthBook should
also be regularly updated to ensure that you are running the latest version with the latest security patches.
GrowthBook updates are backward compatible and can be easily applied with a single command. See
[updating GrowthBook](/self-host#updating-to-latest)

Before deploying GrowthBook in production, we recommend that you make sure you've configured GrowthBook correctly:

* Change the `JWT_SECRET` environment variable. This is used to sign the JWT tokens used for authentication, and needs to be changed from the default.
* Change the `ENCRYPTION_KEY` environment variable. This is used to encrypt sensitive data, and should be set to a long random string.
* Set the `NODE_ENV` environment variable to `production`. This will enable add additional optimizations and disable some debugging features.

## Audit logs

GrowthBook keeps an audit log of all actions taken on the platform. The audit logs is useful if you need to
determine what actions as user has done. You can access this page from the Settings → Log in the left navigation.
You can read more about audit logs [here](/account/audit-logs).