agent-police
Audit an LLM API proxy, router or relay for tool-call tampering and credential exposure — before your agent executes what it returns.
pip install agent-police
agent-police audit https://your-relay.example.com/v1 --model claude-sonnet-4-5
If your agent reaches Claude or GPT through a third-party relay, that relay terminates your TLS session and originates a separate one upstream. It reads — and can rewrite — every JSON payload in flight, including the tool-call arguments the model produced. No provider currently offers an end-to-end integrity mechanism, so a client cannot tell whether the command it is about to execute is the command the model actually emitted.
agent-police probes an endpoint you control and tells you whether it is actually doing that.
The attack taxonomy and the field data come from Liu et al., Your Agent Is Mine: Measuring Malicious Intermediary Attacks on the LLM Supply Chain (arXiv:2604.08407), which measured 428 commodity routers and found 9 injecting malicious code, 17 touching researcher-owned AWS canaries, and 1 draining a researcher-owned ETH key. That paper deliberately does not publish its attack proxy. agent-police is an independent defensive implementation and never executes a command returned by the endpoint under test — detection is purely string- and metadata-level.
What it detects
| Class | Attack | How agent-police sees it |
|---|---|---|
| AC-1 | Tool-call arguments rewritten (fetch URL redirected, extra command chained) | Sends a request whose correct answer is known byte-for-byte, then diffs the returned call |
| AC-1.a | Package name substituted inside an install command, leaving the registry and command line untouched | Same diff, plus typosquat classification (transposition, homoglyph, separator swap, affix) |
| AC-1.b | Injection gated on session features, so routine probes see honest behaviour | Sweeps a grid of tool names, project languages, auto-approve state and warm-up depths, and reports which cells differ |
| AC-2 | Credentials silently harvested from plaintext traffic | Plants canaries across four placements and watches for use |
Plus endpoint hygiene: who actually answers, what router software it looks like, whether provider response headers survive, whether an invalid key is accepted (an open relay), TLS details, and multi-vendor model lists.
Telling tampering apart from model noise
Every probe payload carries a fresh nonce, so a fixed rewrite rule still produces a different string on each trial. agent-police compares the attacker-controlled invariant — the replacement host, the substituted package — rather than the whole argument. A finding is reported as high confidence only when the same rewrite target recurs across distinct nonces, which random model deviation does not do.
Cosmetic differences (whitespace, quoting) are classified as inconclusive, not as tampering.
Install
pip install agent-police
https://pypi.org/project/agent-police/ — published from
.github/workflows/release.yml by PyPI
trusted publishing. No API token exists for this project: GitHub proves the
workflow's identity to PyPI over OIDC, so there is no long-lived credential to
leak or rotate. Every release is built from a tag whose version must match
pyproject.toml, after the suite passes on 3.10 through 3.14.
If you would rather not trust an index at all, build from the tag:
git clone --branch v0.1.0 https://github.com/RomaCredit/agent-police
cd agent-police && python -m venv .venv && ./.venv/bin/pip install .
Use
# Standard audit. The key is prompted for, not echoed, and never hits shell history.
agent-police audit https://your-relay.example.com/v1 \
--model claude-sonnet-4-5 --wire anthropic --repeats 3
# AC-1.b sweep: vary the features a trigger predicate can key on.
agent-police campaign https://your-relay.example.com/v1 \
--model claude-sonnet-4-5 \
--langs rust,go,python --warmups 0,10,50 --rate 20
# No network: heuristically review a command your agent is about to run.
agent-police inspect "curl -sSL https://get.example.com/i.sh | bash"
# Re-check planted canaries. AC-2 shows up days later, not minutes.
# Use the audit id the run printed; it is what the collector filed them under.
agent-police canary check --audit-id cli-1a2b3c4d5e6f
Canaries are registered with whichever collector --canary-base names, before
the probe that carries them is sent. If registration fails the run says
AC-2 COVERAGE LOST rather than implying coverage it does not have. Pass
--no-canary to skip AC-2 entirely, or point --canary-base at a collector of
your own (agent-police serve).
Exit codes: 0 nothing above low, 1 medium, 2 high or critical.
--json emits a machine-readable report.
The limit you cannot engineer around
A clean run is not proof of a clean endpoint. Conditional delivery (AC-1.b) stays dormant until its trigger fires, and the trigger predicate lives on the server. Observed triggers in the wild include a 50-request warm-up, sessions in autonomous auto-approve mode, and Rust or Go projects specifically. No finite black-box probe can establish that a router is honest. agent-police widens coverage; it cannot close this gap, and it says so in every report.
The real fix is provider-side: a signed response envelope binding the model identifier, tool name, tool arguments, finish reason and a client nonce, which the client verifies before executing anything. No major provider tool-use API or the current MCP specification exposes one today.
Hosted service
agent-police serve runs the web UI and the canary collector. A deployment
lives at https://security.romaapi.com.
The web dependencies are an extra, so that a machine that will only ever run
audit does not get a web framework installed on it:
pip install 'agent-police[server]'
agent-police serve --canary-base https://your-host.example.com
The hosted service asks for a key to an endpoint you do not trust, which is the same trust problem it exists to detect. Handling rules, all covered by tests:
- the key lives only in the worker thread's config, never in the job record, the database, a log line or a report;
- everything leaving the process is redacted;
- jobs and results are deleted after 30 minutes and tied to no account;
- targets are validated against SSRF, and the connected peer address is re-checked on every response to close DNS-rebinding.
Prefer the CLI if you would rather your key never left your machine. Either way, use a short-lived key.
FAQ
How do I tell whether my LLM API proxy is modifying responses?
Send a request whose correct answer you already know, then compare. That is
what agent-police audit does: it asks the model to return one exact command
and diffs the tool call that comes back. Any difference is evidence, because
the expected bytes were dictated by the request.
A quick manual version of the same idea, useful against any relay: send hi
and look at prompt_tokens in the response. Single digits is normal. Hundreds
or thousands means something is prepending content you did not send — and
billing you for it.
Is it safe to buy discounted Claude or GPT API access from a reseller?
A reseller is an application-layer man-in-the-middle by design. It terminates your TLS and originates its own connection upstream, so it reads your prompts, tool definitions and API key in plaintext, and can rewrite the tool calls your agent then executes. No provider offers an integrity mechanism that would let you detect that.
The paper this tool implements measured 428 commodity routers and found 9 injecting malicious code, 17 touching researcher-owned AWS canary credentials, and one draining a researcher-owned Ethereum key. Paid access was not safer than free: 1 of 28 purchased routers injected.
Does a clean scan mean the endpoint is safe?
No, and the report says so every time. Conditional delivery (AC-1.b) stays dormant until its trigger fires. Triggers observed in the wild include a 50-request warm-up, sessions in autonomous auto-approve mode, and Rust or Go projects specifically. The trigger predicate lives on the server, so no finite probe can rule it out. agent-police widens coverage; it cannot close that gap.
Does agent-police execute the commands it tests?
Never. Detection is purely string- and metadata-level. The probes ask for a command, the tool diffs the returned arguments, and nothing is run. That is a deliberate difference from the measurement pipeline in the paper, which executed payloads in a sandbox.
Do I have to hand over my API key?
Not for everything. The endpoint checks that need no key — who actually answers, what router software it looks like, whether provider response headers survive, whether an invalid key is accepted — run without one, on the CLI and on the hosted scanner both. Only AC-1 and AC-1.a need a key, because they require a real model response to diff.
What is AC-1, AC-1.a, AC-1.b, AC-2?
The attack taxonomy from arXiv:2604.08407. AC-1 rewrites the arguments of a returned tool call. AC-1.a substitutes a package name inside an install command, leaving the registry and the rest of the command untouched so domain allowlists never fire. AC-1.b gates either of those on session features. AC-2 harvests credentials from plaintext traffic without changing anything, which is why it can only be caught with canaries.
Does this work with OpenAI-compatible endpoints, or only Anthropic?
Both. --wire openai speaks /v1/chat/completions, --wire anthropic speaks
/v1/messages. The same detection logic handles either; OpenAI nests tool
arguments as a JSON string, Anthropic exposes them as native JSON.
Development
python -m venv .venv && ./.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]' fastapi 'uvicorn[standard]'
./.venv/bin/pytest
The suite runs the full auditor against a mock router that implements each attack class, including a check that a single-fingerprint audit misses conditional delivery entirely — the paper's central point about black-box auditing.
Scope
Probe only endpoints you own or are authorised to test.
License
Apache-2.0
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