Capable because it's secure, not despite it.
A powerful assistant with access to your life is only a good idea if it's locked down properly. These are the principles that let Monty do so much, safely.
The philosophy
We didn't bolt security on at the end. The whole thing is built on a few non-negotiable ideas, own everything, trust nothing by default, and give every part only what it needs.
Founding principles
Every moving part runs on hardware we own and control. No rented platform sits between Monty and our data.
Nothing is trusted simply because of where it sits on the network. Every connection is verified, every time.
Each service, device, and credential gets the minimum access it needs to do its job, and not a scrap more.
Designed so that if one piece is ever compromised, the blast radius is small and contained by default.
Credentials live in a dedicated, self-hosted vault, never hardcoded, never sitting in plain text.
No open doors to the public internet. Access happens through an encrypted private mesh, outbound-only at the edge.
How it fits together
Public-facing traffic is handled at the edge by a zero-trust gateway, no ports opened on our own connection, identity checks in front of anything private.
Internally, our own devices talk to each other over a self-hosted encrypted mesh. Two independent layers have to be satisfied before anything is reachable.
A zero-trust tunnel terminates public traffic with no inbound ports, fronting only what's meant to be public.
Devices join a private encrypted network so internal services are reachable to us, and invisible to everyone else.
Each service runs isolated and scoped, pulling its secrets from the vault and nothing else.
Operating practice
The whole estate was put through a full security review and hardened, and it's revisited as things change.
Service health and uptime are watched continuously, with alerts the moment something needs a look.
Memory and configuration are version-controlled and backed up, so Monty's continuity survives any single failure.
Components are kept current as a matter of routine, staying patched is part of staying secure.