Data privacy compliance with Sitecore CDP
Sitecore CDP provides tools and APIs that can help your organization comply with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Sitecore CDP enables you to delete or modify guest data, or stop identity profiling entirely.
This guide is aimed at developers and IT professionals. You can use it to understand how Sitecore CDP stores cookies, processes data, and provides audit logs.
Data encryption
Sitecore CDP encrypts data at rest and in transit.
Data at rest is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption that uses 256-bit encryption keys. AES puts data through several rounds of substitution, transposition, and mixing, making it harder to compromise and much more rigorous than a single round of encryption. The encryption keys are kept separate from the data, preventing the data from being decrypted since the keys are not with the application or data.
Data in transit is encrypted using industry-standard HTTPS and SSH protocols, including HTTP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security 1.2 (TLS). All traffic entering and leaving Sitecore CDP is encrypted using TLS 1.2 with an industry-standard AES-256 cipher.
Cookies
Sitecore CDP stores cookies in the web browser as first-party cookies. First-party cookies are cookies set by the domain that appears in the web browser's address bar.
The Engage SDK supports setting cookies from the client and from the server. We recommend setting cookies from the server because it increases security by adding the httpOnly
attribute to cookies. This helps prevent client-side JavaScript from accessing the cookies and mitigates cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
Only load the Engage SDK and set cookies if your site visitor grants consent. See also a code example to check if your site visitor accepts cookies.
Sitecore CDP stores the following cookies:
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bid_{clientKey}
- this cookie persists the browser ID between sessions, which is required for all calls that the Engage SDK makes to Sitecore CDP. This cookie generates a universally unique identifier (UUID) that is unique per browser until the cookie expires or is deleted. After the cookie expires or is deleted, a new UUID is generated the next time the visitor returns. -
bx_bucket_number
- this session cookie is used only if you have Sitecore Personalize and if you're using web experiences or web experiments in your app. The cookie allocates the guest to a specific variant. It performs allocation for each web experiment that is live on your site during the particular session. The cookie is only stored for the duration of the session. -
bx_guest_ref
- this session cookie is used only if you have Sitecore Personalize and if you're using web experiences or web experiments in your app. The cookie assigns a universally unique identifier (UUID) to every user with a bucket. The cookie is only stored for the duration of the session.
API usage
Sitecore CDP provides Batch APIs that can help your organization with data privacy compliance. Here are some of the operations you can perform using the Batch API:
Auditing
Sitecore's Common Audit Log (CAL) is a tool that collects audit log events from supported Sitecore DXP apps, including Sitecore CDP. This is particularly useful in helping your organization become HIPPA-eligible. CAL provides the Query API to make audit log events available to authenticated users. The Query API enables you to set up a webhook to send audit logs directly from Sitecore CDP to your organization's systems.
CAL automatically captures users' actions through events and stores the information in logs. The logs include generic user events that are managed through Sitecore Cloud Portal, such as user_password_reset_requested
.
Here's some of the captured data you can access through CAL:
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unique identifier of the logged in user
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action performed by the user captured as a specific event
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UTC timestamp of when the user performed the action