Compliance
Consensus is SOC 2 Type II compliant. The audit covers the security, availability, and confidentiality of the Consensus service. Request the current report and bridge letter through sales; we share it under NDA as part of your vendor review. The hosting platform, Google Cloud, holds its own certifications, including ISO 27001, SOC 1/2/3, and PCI DSS.What is sent
A search request carries the user’s query and any filters (year range, study type, journal quartile, and so on), plus the credential: a bearer API key or a per-user OAuth token. Requests go tohttps://mcp.consensus.app/mcp over HTTPS.
When your users upload documents or search their Library in the Consensus web app, that content stays in their private Library. The MCP server and API never read a user’s Library; they search only the public research index.
What comes back
Publicly available academic paper metadata: title, authors, journal, year, citation count, DOI, abstract, and on paid plans a study-type classification, a key takeaway, and optionally query-relevant excerpts from the paper’s full text. Nothing in a response is derived from your organization’s data.What Consensus stores
- No personal data is stored from MCP requests.
- Customer data is not used to train AI models, and the LLM providers Consensus uses retain no data from requests.
- Consensus does not share user data with third parties.
- Uploads to a user’s Library are private to that account unless the user shares a Collection.
- Enterprise agreements can include a zero-data-retention option.
Encryption
Data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2 or later and at rest with AES-256. Secrets and credentials are managed in Google Cloud Secret Manager.Infrastructure
The service runs in a private Google Cloud VPC with restrictive firewall rules, across multiple zones with automated failover. Public traffic passes through Google Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud Armor, which provides WAF, OWASP protections, and DDoS mitigation. Internal traffic is segmented and TLS-encrypted. Enterprise agreements can include a contractual uptime SLA.Access control
- Customers are logically segregated within the multi-tenant environment.
- Production access is limited to authorized engineering and operations staff, requires SSO with MFA, follows least privilege, and is logged. Access grants, changes, and offboarding follow documented approval and review processes evidenced under SOC 2.
- Employee devices are managed with MDM-enforced anti-malware and full-disk encryption.
Authentication for your users
- SAML 2.0 single sign-on with AD FS, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and other identity providers. Group-based access can be driven by SAML attribute mapping from your directory.
- Federated authentication for academic institutions.
- Institutional admins manage their own users and roles.
- For MCP and API access, users authenticate with OAuth 2.0 (authorization code with PKCE), or your gateway holds an API key server-side. See the connection reference.
Monitoring and audit logging
Access, admin, and system events are centralized in Google Cloud Logging with audit logging enabled. User sign-in and sign-out events and user actions are recorded with user attribution. Application and infrastructure monitoring runs in Datadog. Customer-specific log excerpts are available on request where contractually agreed.Vulnerability management
CI/CD pipelines include automated dependency and misconfiguration scanning. A third-party penetration test is performed annually, and findings are triaged by severity under the vulnerability management policy. A summary is available under NDA.Credentials
- API keys are shown once at creation, can be named, revoked, and rotated from the API & MCP Dashboard, and are scoped to search. Store them in your gateway’s secret store, never in client-side code.
- OAuth tokens are issued per user after an authorization-code flow with PKCE (S256). There is no client-credentials grant and no way to obtain a token without a user’s consent. Users can disconnect at any time from their Consensus account.
Endpoint integrity
Only connect to the official endpoint,https://mcp.consensus.app/mcp. The OAuth discovery documents at mcp.consensus.app/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource and consensus.app/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server let a gateway verify the authorization server it is talking to.