Data & Storage

Redis — ephemeral state

Redis is the short-term memory: challenges, tickets, and counters that live for seconds to hours, entirely in RAM. It is configured so nothing ever touches disk.

Redis is the sticky-notes drawer. Everything in it is temporary — a puzzle to solve, a one-time ticket, a tally of how busy things are. The drawer is wiped clean on every restart, and by design none of it is ever written to disk. Even the note labels are scrambled so they can’t point back to a person.

Redis runs with save "" (no RDB) and appendonly no (no AOF), so no key ever hits disk; maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru evicts rather than persists. Every identity-scoped key is scope:HMAC-SHA256(redis_ns_key, scope:identity) — a purpose-bound HKDF subkey, distinct from the token MAC key (PVX-24). Aggregate pressure counters use non-identifying minute buckets.

single-use · GETDEL counter lock config
Redis key families
in-memory only · short TTLs · HMAC-namespaced
single-use (GETDEL) counter lock config
Figure. A restart drops every key here — sessions re-auth, in-flight recoveries retry, and PoW pressure briefly resets to baseline. That fragility is the point.

Every key family