Block risky calls with Guard
Guard is the security stage - deliberately first in the pipeline. Every tool-call and payload is evaluated pre-flight, before anything runs: secret patterns, OWASP-scored injection, sandbox rules. Fail-closed - if policy can't be evaluated, the call doesn't run.
Prerequisite: Surfil installed and intercepting - see Install. Guard is active on the security stage from the moment interception is wired; there is no separate enable step.
When you need this
The moment you let an agent execute tool calls - shell commands, file writes, outbound requests - you have a blast-radius problem. Guard exists so a prompt-injected or simply wrong tool call gets stopped at the one interception point instead of after it ran.
What happens on each call
- Your agent issues a request; it crosses the single interception point.
- Guard evaluates it against policy pre-flight.
- The call is allowed, sandboxed, or blocked. If policy evaluation itself fails, the call is blocked - fail-closed, always.
- A Weave fact records the decision, with provenance.
What gets recorded - and what doesn't
- Each decision becomes a signed Weave fact: what was decided, by which rule, when.
- The blocked call's content never leaves the device - only decision metadata does. Same zero-trace rule as everything else.
How you know it worked
- Blocked or sandboxed calls surface as decisions in your session record and as Weave facts -
surfil mind statsshows the spine receiving them. - Allowed traffic is untouched: passthrough stays byte-exact, so normal work is indistinguishable from running without Surfil.
If a legitimate call is being blocked, that is Guard doing its job with a rule you need to adjust - fail-closed means false positives block rather than slip through. Enterprise deployments layer Policy on top of Guard to simulate a rule change against recorded traffic before it enforces anything live.
Related
- Weave - where Guard's decisions live.
- Zero-trace - why blocked content never leaves the device.
- FAQ - short answers on security posture.