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Comment by Apylon777 | Hacker News Reader

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Apylon777·

This is a really cool library to look at even if you aren't running openclaw directly.

Lots of good concepts to seek inspiration from.

1. process-scoped egress policy

2. policy-as-code

3. explicit approval classes

4. normalized network/ guardrail receipts.

5. structured guardrail outcomes

6. centralized decision rules

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Thanks! Don't forget wire level protocol parsing - this is important because agents usually can spawn subprocesses and if they have postgres credentials, you're just one psql call away from disaster if you only have MCP/HTTP proxies in place.

So, why not instead limit your agents to a few endpoints / MCP functions that you control, which give access to your db (or whatever) through read-only permissions?

It seems this is a bit like "reinventing permissions" no?

Could work - but our agents (codex/claude/openclaw) spawn subprocesses - imagine an engineer uses claude to debug an issue, it spawns psql directly, routing around MCP. Wire level interception is the only place a process tree can't escape.

Regarding reinventing permissions - scoped credentials solve this to some extent, but it's really nice to have a single place where we can define rules for all services (eg "DROP TABLE" never can occur), or you can SELECT unless it includes the env_vars.secrets column.

It would be able to spawn psql correctly, but wouldn't be able to connect to the database (if it's secured with user accounts). It would only be able to use the database through the MCP (which uses a read-only account to connect).

I understand the "centralized registry" thing, but it's also easy to "forget about one case", and agents are good at circumventing stuff ("oh, I cannot DROP table, let me just remove all rows", etc). So I'd rather trust the permissions of the original db (eg getting a read-only account) which I presume have been battle-tested for this

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