Proposal: Agentveil Whitepaper (Agent Privacy Gateway)

[akramcodez]

Overview

This PR introduces the working whitepaper for Agentveil (formerly referred to as Agent Privacy Gateway). Agentveil is an open-source, local-first policy gateway that intercepts sensitive actions taken by AI coding agents and evaluates them against a strict, user-authored allowlist.

Problem Addressed

As local coding agents like Nanocoder become more autonomous, they require broader permissions (filesystem, shell, network, MCP). Giving an agent full access to your computer grants it much more capability than it actually needs for a given task, making users vulnerable to indirect prompt injections, out-of-bounds secret reads, and unintended data exfiltration.

Proposed Solution

Agentveil mediates the agent's actions by sitting at the process boundary. It enforces least-privilege semantics across four layers:

1. Filesystem: Strict path-allowlisting (denies .env, ~/.ssh, etc. by default).
2. Shell: Command & argument inspection.
3. Network: Egress allowlisting and known-bad IP blocklisting.
4. MCP: Per-tool permissions.

It seamlessly composes with prompt-scrub and Nanocoder to form a complete, local-first privacy envelope for the Nano Collective ecosystem.

Key Principles

• Least privilege by default: Deny-by-default, allow-by-explicit-grant.
• Inspectable policy: YAML-based (policy.yaml), diffable, and version-controlled.
• Fail-safe: If the gateway crashes, the agent fails closed.
• Audit-quality: Append-only, hash-chained log entries.

Next Steps / Review

The whitepaper outlines the threat model, v1 scope, and competitive landscape. We are opening this for public review to get feedback on:

• Implementation language choice (Rust vs. TypeScript)
• Default profile boundaries (permissive, balanced, strict)
• Mediation placement (in-process SDK vs. out-of-process daemon)