To generate and deploy a workflow, Gydmation AI needs to hold a connection to the user's own n8n instance. That connection is, functionally, a set of credentials — and a self-hosted product that mishandles credentials undermines the exact privacy promise self-hosting is supposed to deliver.
Every stored n8n connection is encrypted at rest using Fernet symmetric encryption before it ever touches disk. The distinction matters: TLS in transit protects data on the way to the server, but does nothing for a database file or backup sitting on that server afterward. Encryption at rest is what keeps a leaked backup from also being a leaked credential store.
Encryption is only as good as key management, and the original design left the encryption key as a manual setup step — one line to add to an environment file, on every deployment. In practice, an optional manual step is a step a self-hosting operator skips under deadline, and we confirmed exactly that from real deployment reports. The fix generates a real encryption key automatically on first run if none exists, and never touches an existing key afterward — a missing key is a bug worth failing loudly on, but a silently regenerated key would be worse: it would permanently lock every already-saved connection behind a key that can no longer decrypt them.
We applied the identical pattern to the admin dashboard's own access secret, which had been falling back to a hardcoded default whenever an operator didn't set one — a default sitting in public source code, protecting an admin panel with a password anyone reading the repository already knew. Same root cause, same fix: generate a real secret automatically, and never fall back to a shared one.
