Pipelock Open Source AI Security Firewall

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Pipelock: AI-Driven Firewall for Securing AI Agents

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), security threats have become increasingly sophisticated. One critical vulnerability lies in AI coding agents, which often operate with unfettered access to sensitive data and the internet.

A Single Point of Failure

This single point of failure makes them an attractive target for attackers seeking to compromise credentials and disrupt operations.

Pipelock: A Solution to the Problem

To address this issue, researchers have developed Pipelock, an open-source security harness designed to insert an enforcement layer between AI agents and the network.

The Architecture of Pipelock

By doing so, Pipelock creates a secure barrier that prevents unauthorized access and ensures the integrity of sensitive information.

According to Waldrep, the lead developer behind Pipelock, “The goal is to create a publicly accessible, standard format for agent attestation, allowing other vendors and open-source projects to integrate and verify Pipelock evidence.”

The Two-Zone Design

The architecture of Pipelock involves a two-zone design, where the agent process holds sensitive secrets and operates without direct network access, while the proxy holds network access but does not store secrets.

The Scanner Pipeline

Traffic between the two zones passes through an 11-layer scanner pipeline, which enforces various security measures, including scheme enforcement, CRLF injection detection, path traversal blocking, and domain blocklisting.

DLP Layer

The DLP (Data Loss Prevention) layer within Pipelock covers 48 different credential patterns, including API keys, tokens, and financial account numbers.

Checksum Validators

Four checksum validators – Luhn, mod-97, ABA, and WIF – are used to suppress false positives and ensure the accuracy of the system.

Response Scanning

Response scanning applies 25 injection detection patterns with six normalization passes to detect and prevent zero-width character attacks, homoglyphs, and leetspeak.

Coverage Beyond Traditional HTTP Traffic

Pipelock’s coverage extends beyond traditional HTTP traffic, supporting connections such as CONNECT tunnels, WebSocket frames, and Google Agent-to-Agent protocol messages.

Audit Output

The audit output takes the form of a hash-chained tamper-evident log with optional Ed25519 signatures, supplemented by signed assessment bundles and CycloneDX 1.6 agent bills of materials.

Compliance Mappings

Compliance mappings include the OWASP MCP Top 10, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10, MITRE ATT & CK technique IDs, EU AI Act runtime controls, SOC 2 control families, and NIST 800-53.

Integration with GitHub Code Scanning

The system also outputs SARIF v2.1.0 files, integrating with GitHub Code Scanning.

Pipelock: Available Now

Pipelock is currently available for download on GitHub, offering a free, open-source solution for securing AI agents and mitigating potential security risks.