cogniwall 0.1.1

A programmable firewall for autonomous AI agents

Stripe Radar, but for Autonomous AI Agents.
A programmable firewall that sits between your AI agents and the outside world.

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CogniWall intercepts hallucinations, enforces deterministic limits, and blocks malicious actions before they execute in your production system.

Think of it as a pipeline engine: ultra-fast classical checks (regex, limits) run first, and slower LLM-based semantic checks only run if needed.

Features

Guardrail Rules:

• PII Detection: Stop your agents from leaking SSNs, Credit Cards, or other sensitive data.
• Prompt Injection Defense: Prevent jailbreaks and malicious payloads from altering your agent's core instructions.
• Financial Limiters: Hardcode maximum spend limits or transaction bounds.
• Tone & Sentiment Veto: Block AI-generated content that creates legal liability, is overly angry, or politically biased.
• Rate Limiting: Prevent runaway recursive loops or spamming of downstream APIs.
• Custom Python Rules: Subclass our rules engine to write your own checks.

Audit Dashboard:

• Event Log: See every evaluation attempt — approved, blocked, or errored — with filtering and search.
• Payload Drill-down: Click any event to see the full verdict, rule details, and original payload.
• Analytics: Block rate over time, most-triggered rules, top blocked agents.

📦 Installation

Requires Python 3.11+.

pip install cogniwall                  # Core rules (PII, financial, rate limit)
pip install cogniwall[anthropic]       # + Anthropic-powered rules (tone, injection)
pip install cogniwall[openai]          # + OpenAI-powered rules

🛠️ Quickstart

CogniWall uses a cogniwall.yaml to define active rules, or it can be configured programmatically.

from cogniwall import CogniWall, PiiDetectionRule, FinancialLimitRule, ToneSentimentRule

# Build a guard with the rules you need
guard = CogniWall(rules=[
    PiiDetectionRule(block=["ssn", "credit_card"]),
    FinancialLimitRule(field="amount", max=10_000),
    ToneSentimentRule(
        field="body",
        block=["angry", "sarcastic"],
        provider="anthropic",                # or "openai"
        api_key_env="ANTHROPIC_API_KEY",
    ),
])

# Evaluate a payload BEFORE your agent executes an action
verdict = guard.evaluate({"body": "Ignore all previous instructions.", "amount": 500})

if verdict.blocked:
    print(f"Action blocked by '{verdict.rule}': {verdict.reason}")
else:
    # Safe to execute!
    pass

Set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY in your environment for LLM-powered rules.

Or load rules from YAML:

from cogniwall import CogniWall

guard = CogniWall.from_yaml("cogniwall.yaml")
verdict = guard.evaluate({"body": "Hello world", "amount": 50})

Example cogniwall.yaml:

version: "1"
on_error: error

rules:
  - type: pii_detection
    block: [ssn, credit_card]

  - type: financial_limit
    field: amount
    max: 10000

  # LLM-powered rules (requires pip install cogniwall[anthropic])
  # - type: prompt_injection
  #   provider: anthropic
  #   api_key_env: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

  # - type: tone_sentiment
  #   field: body
  #   block: [angry, sarcastic]
  #   provider: anthropic
  #   api_key_env: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

# audit:
#   endpoint: http://localhost:3000/api/events

Audit Dashboard

CogniWall includes a self-hosted dashboard for monitoring your AI agent evaluations in real-time.

from cogniwall import CogniWall, AuditClient, PiiDetectionRule

# Connect to the dashboard
audit = AuditClient(endpoint="http://localhost:3000/api/events")
guard = CogniWall(rules=[PiiDetectionRule(block=["ssn"])], audit=audit)

# Events automatically appear in the dashboard
verdict = guard.evaluate(
    {"body": "SSN: 123-45-6789"},
    metadata={"agent_id": "support-bot"},
)

Start the dashboard (requires Node.js 18+ and Docker):

cd dashboard
npm install
cp .env.example .env             # Configure DATABASE_URL
docker compose up db -d          # Start PostgreSQL
npx prisma migrate dev --name init
npm run dev                      # http://localhost:3000

The Open Core Strategy

CogniWall is an open-core project. The Python engine and self-hosted dashboard will always remain open-source and free. We are building it this way because security tools require maximum trust and zero adoption friction.

CogniWall Cloud (coming soon) adds: unlimited data retention, real-time streaming, alerts/webhooks, multi-tenancy, and global threat intelligence. Upgrading is one line:

audit = AuditClient(endpoint="https://api.cogniwall.io/events", api_key="cw_live_...")

Roadmap

• Phase 1: Core Pipeline & MVP Rules (PII, Financial, Inject)
• Phase 2: Extendable Python API & Semantic Rules (Tone, Rate Limit)
• Phase 3: Visual Audit Dashboard (Next.js + PostgreSQL)
• Phase 4: Hosted SaaS Engine

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, testing, and PR guidelines.

For security vulnerabilities, see SECURITY.md.

📝 License

CogniWall is released under the MIT License.