Definition

Stealth Cloud is a cloud computing architecture built on three non-negotiable constraints: the operator stores nothing (zero persistence), knows nothing (zero knowledge), and identifies no one (zero identity). Unlike public cloud, where the provider holds both your data and the keys to decrypt it, a Stealth Cloud system is designed so that even a fully compromised server yields nothing useful to an attacker—or to the operator itself.

The term defines a third paradigm of cloud computing that rejects the foundational assumption of every major cloud provider: that trust in the operator is a reasonable default.

Why It Matters

The global cloud infrastructure market reached $679 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $1.44 trillion by 2029. Nearly all of that revenue flows to providers who retain contractual and technical access to customer data. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively process an estimated 94% of enterprise cloud workloads—and each of them can be compelled by government subpoena to hand over customer data, often without notifying the customer at all.

This is the architectural flaw that Stealth Cloud addresses. Not with policy. Not with promises. With mathematics. When encryption keys exist only on the client and data persists only in RAM, there is nothing to subpoena, nothing to breach, and nothing to sell.

For AI workloads, the problem compounds. Every prompt sent to a traditional AI provider passes through infrastructure the user does not control, touching servers that may log, analyze, or train on that input. Stealth Cloud treats AI inference the way end-to-end encrypted messaging treats chat: the relay infrastructure is architecturally blind.

How It Works

A Stealth Cloud system enforces its guarantees through a combination of technical mechanisms:

  1. Client-side encryption: All data is encrypted using AES-256-GCM via the Web Crypto API before it leaves the browser. The server never holds the decryption key.
  2. Ephemeral compute: Processing happens in isolated V8 runtime environments (such as Cloudflare Workers) that exist only for the duration of a request. No disk writes. No persistent memory.
  3. Cryptographic shredding: When a session ends, the encryption key is destroyed. The ciphertext becomes mathematically irrecoverable.
  4. PII stripping: Before any prompt reaches an LLM provider, personally identifiable information is tokenized and replaced client-side using WebAssembly-based named entity recognition.
  5. Wallet-based authentication: Users authenticate via Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE), producing a cryptographic proof of identity that requires no email, password, or phone number.

The result is a system where the operator cannot comply with a data request—not because of policy, but because the data does not exist in any accessible form.

Stealth Cloud Relevance

Stealth Cloud is not a product built on top of existing cloud assumptions. It is the rejection of those assumptions. Every component—from ephemeral infrastructure to zero-persistence architecture—exists to enforce a single principle: the infrastructure should know nothing about the people using it.

The first product built on this architecture is Ghost Chat, an AI chat interface where prompts are PII-stripped, encrypted client-side, processed in ephemeral edge workers, and shredded on session end. No logs. No training data. No identity graph.

The Stealth Cloud Perspective

Stealth Cloud exists because the question was never “can we trust the cloud provider?"—it was always “why should we have to?” The Stealth Cloud Manifesto makes the case: the only data that cannot be breached, subpoenaed, or sold is data that was never stored.