What Dormouse actually does
The whole picture on one page: the job it performs, what it watches, how it
thinks, what lands in your hands, and why the record can be trusted.
01The job
It performs a control almost nobody performs.
If you hold or are pursuing SOC 2 or ISO 27001, you own a vendor-management control
(CC9.2, A.15) that says you monitor your vendors for changes. In practice that means
someone is supposed to reread forty subprocessor pages, DPAs, and trust centers on a
schedule. Almost nobody does, and once a year an auditor asks how you monitor your
vendors, and the answer is a mumble.
Dormouse does the checking, every twelve hours, forever, and keeps evidence that the
checking happened. It replaces the mumble with an attachment.
02What it watches
The pages where vendor risk shows up first.
- Subprocessor lists, where a new company quietly starts touching
your customers' data and your DPA obligations start ticking.
- DPAs, trust centers, and terms, where certifications, residency
commitments, and legal posture change.
- Regulator pages, for regulated verticals that need eyes on FDA,
EMA, or EPA surfaces.
Fourteen major SaaS vendors come pre-tuned, and anything with a URL can be added. A
page can be watched whole, or by named fields, down to a single table, so a rotating
banner never wakes anyone.
03How it thinks
Four verbs, in a loop, with judgment between them.
WATCH
Fetch politely, miss nothing
Conditional requests, retries, per-host pacing. A failed check never becomes the
baseline, so an outage cannot swallow a change. Volume 01
JUDGE
Decide what matters, deterministically
Ignore masks, minimum-change thresholds, anti-flap, cooldowns. Meaningful is a
verdict from inspectable rules, never a model's mood. Volume 03
TELL
Interrupt rarely, record always
Meaningful changes alert by email, text, or Slack with a severity. Everything
meaningful lands in the digest, the quiet morning record.
Volume 05
PROVE
Chain every check, invite the audit
Every check, including failures and silence, is hash-chained, keyed, and anchored.
Anyone holding the record can verify it. Volume 04
An added subprocessor is reported by name: "Added: Stripe Inc.
Removed: Amazon Web Services." Not "page changed," but what changed, judged against noise
rules tuned per page.
04What lands in your hands
Three artifacts, three tempos.
- The alert, within hours of a meaningful change, classified by
severity, with a one-sentence summary of who should care.
- The digest, one summary of everything meaningful since the last
one, built for a morning cron and a calm cup of coffee.
- The monthly report, one self-contained file: every check performed,
every change caught, every source verified, integrity proof included. This is the one
that goes in the audit folder, and the reason the auditor's question takes one
attachment to answer. See a live sample.
05Why the record holds up
Because you can attack it and watch it catch you.
Screenshots and spreadsheets can be edited after the fact, which is why they prove so
little. Dormouse's record is different in kind: snapshots are stored under the
fingerprint of their own bytes, every check is chained to the one before it with a secret
key, and verification is anchored so history cannot even be quietly shortened.
Rewrite a recorded failure as a success and verification names the exact
broken entry. Delete the newest entry and the anchor calls out the truncation. We ran
both attacks in public.
The demonstrations, and the plain-language walkthrough for the person who has to trust
the report, live at How the proof works.
06What it is not
Honest edges, stated plainly.
- Not a GRC platform. If you run Vanta or Drata, keep them. They
track this control's paperwork; Dormouse performs the control and produces the evidence
their locker is missing. The report drops straight in.
- Not a scanner or a security product for your own code. It watches
the outside world you depend on, not your repositories.
- Not legal advice. It tells you a subprocessor changed and proves
you knew; deciding to object is your call, made early instead of late.
- Not a promise of compliance. It proves the checking happened and
the record is intact. No honest tool can claim more, which is exactly why auditors can
accept what it does claim.