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I built a firewall for agents because prompt engineering isn't security

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Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum.I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself.If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets.So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source "Safety Kernel" that sits between the LLM's intent and the actual execution.The architecture is designed to be language-agnostic: 1. *Control Plane (Go/NATS/Redis):* Manages the state and policy. 2. *The Protocol (CAP v2):* A wire format that defines jobs, steps, and results. 3. *Workers:* You can write your agent in Python (using Pydantic), Node, or Go, and they all connect to the same safety mesh.Key features I focused on: - *The "Kill Switch":* Ability to revoke an agent's permissions instantly via the message bus, without killing the host server. - *Audit Logs:* Every intent and action is recorded (critical for when things go wrong). - *Policy Enforcement:* Blocking actions based on metadata (e.g., "Review required for any transfer > $50") before they reach the worker.It’s still early days (v0.x), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the architecture. Is a separate control plane overkill, or is this where agentic infrastructure is heading?Repo: https://github.com/cordum-io/cordum Docs: [Link to your docs if you have them]Thanks!

HN · launched Jan 19, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 65%) · 0 views

Niche: ai agent security and monitoring tools · 297 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -44% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Security
  • Compliance & governance
  • B2B
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Building an external firewall/proxy for autonomous AI agents requires deep network security, protocol inspection, sandboxing, and runtime policy enforcement to prevent unauthorized actions and data leaks.

What it would actually take: The architecture requires an out-of-band or forward/reverse proxy (written in Rust or Go) intercepting tool execution requests, database queries, and network egress calls made by agent sandboxes. The hard parts include deterministic schema validation, zero-trust credential isolation, egress filtering to prevent SSRF and prompt injection data exfiltration, and low-latency interception. It requires specialized expertise in network security, container sandboxing, and systems engineering.

Discussion

7 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Exordex (AI agent testing/CI-CD tool), MCP security testing frameworks

Concerns raised: Latency impact when control plane intercepts every intent, Overkill for simple/demo use cases, Relying on prompt engineering for safety with production data

Feature requests: Chaos engineering features for agent testing, MCP security test integration

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 805 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #513 of 806 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 79 days after the earliest competitor.

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