AWS and Cloudanix team co-authored this blog: Real-Time Threat and Anomaly Detection for Workloads on AWS
← Coding Agent Guard

Capability · Pre-action

5-axis inspection,
before each tool call runs

Every tool call a coding agent makes is normalized and scanned across five axes before it executes — then allowed, redacted, warned or blocked against one centrally-managed policy.

On-device · pre-action · agent-agnostic
cdxai · pre-action hook
 claude "ship the billing service to prod with our cloud keys"

⚠  Cloudanix Guard — inspecting tool call
   hook  : PreToolUse        agent : claude-code

✗ egress        cloud access-key in prompt   [CRITICAL]
✓ ingress       no injection markers
⚡ output        introduced-dependency        [LOW]
✗ action-authz  command not allowed on prod  [HIGH]

●  decision: BLOCK  strictest-mode-wins · 0.6 ms
   prompt not forwarded · command not executed
   audit-id : guard-7f3a2c1e  (hash-chained)

The risk

One control point for the whole agent attack surface

A coding agent is not just an egress pipe — it reads, runs, and writes with your developer's privileges. A single-axis scanner is blind to four of the five ways that goes wrong.

What it sends

Credentials, personal data and proprietary source travel verbatim inside prompts and tool arguments to a third-party model — past CASB, DLP and proxies.

What it runs

Destructive shell commands, protected-branch pushes and credential rotation run autonomously, before any code review.

What it reads & writes

A poisoned README can hijack its next action, and the code it writes can be insecure or pull slopsquatted dependencies.

Mechanics

One hook. Every action checked.

01

Hook

A one-line install wires the guard into every coding agent's pre-action hook — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf and Kiro.

02

Normalize

Each agent's tool-call shape is normalized into one internal payload — prompt, files and the tool name being invoked.

03

Inspect across 5 axes

Egress, ingress, output, action-safety and action-authz scanners run in-process. De-obfuscation strips zero-width unicode and decodes base64 before matching.

04

Decide

Strictest-mode-wins over (type, severity) plus rule overrides yields one verdict: allow, redact, warn or block. The most dangerous commands never override.

05

Prove

The decision lands in a tamper-evident, hash-chained local audit trail and the Console fleet view — the matched value never leaves the device.

Inside the capability

The five axes

Each axis answers a different question about the same tool call — and carries its own default disposition tuned to be low-friction.

Egress

What may the agent send? Credentials, personal data and sensitive file paths in prompts and tool args — blocked or redacted by severity.

Ingress

Is the content it reads trying to hijack it? Indirect prompt-injection markers in READMEs, fetched pages and MCP responses — audited with a nudge.

Output

Is the code it writes dangerous? Insecure sinks (eval / exec / SQL injection / pickle / innerHTML) and an introduced-dependency signal for slopsquat correlation.

Action-safety

Is this command unrecoverable? A narrow, high-precision set of catastrophic commands is blocked unconditionally — no inline bypass, ever.

Action-authz

Is this tool allowed to do this? Per-tool allowed commands, blocked patterns, path and MCP-server policy — the on-device policy decision point.

Severity-aware fail-mode

On an internal error a high-blast-radius action fails closed while a read fails open — the guard never wedges a session on its own failure.

Outcomes

What security & compliance teams get

  • On-device, pre-action control — stops the risky action before it runs, unbypassable like a network proxy
  • One policy and one verdict model across five coding agents
  • Real credential leaks and unrecoverable commands stopped; everything else is at most a one-line nudge
  • Privacy-first — categorical findings reach the Console, the matched value never leaves the device
  • A tamper-evident local audit chain for every block, override and detection
  • Backward-compatible & opt-in — new axes are empty by default until an admin turns them on

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