Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities

https://github.com/makerchecker/MakerChecker

by smashini • 17 days ago

44 19 17 days ago

smashini8• 17 days ago

Hey all :)

I've been working an open-source toolkit to stop AI agents from running amok.

You can scan your code (Python, JS, TS) and it will flag any risks and can offer fixes. It runs offline, but you can wire an LLM to do code analysis as well.

You can run it with:

npx @makerchecker/scan

Would love to get any feedback!

smashini8• 17 days ago

oopsie doopsie, release pipeline failed fixing now...

smashini8• 17 days ago

should be fixed and released now :)

__MatrixMan__3• 17 days ago

Why build separate frameworks for this kind of thing when your operating system is right there?

You can make a file called "orders" and you can run your agent as a user with write access to that file, or as one that doesn't, and then you don't need scans or audits to tell you whether the agent can create orders or not, you can just take your operating system's word for it.

Is there anything all this bolt-on AI security stuff does that can't instead be handled by donning a sysadmin hat and managing your agents as separate users?

skinfaxi• 17 days ago

Is there anything all this bolt-on AI security stuff does that can't instead be handled by donning a sysadmin hat and managing your agents as separate users?

Like everything else, the packaging and ergonomics matter. Do we need podman or docker when we could just don our sysadmin hats and manage namespaces and cgroups directly instead?

smashini8• 17 days ago

I’d say the biggest difference would be: 1. Parameter-aware rules: OS permissions don’t know your application logic. (How would you tell OS permissions not to let your AI to trade on over 1M dollars) 2. You can’t easily model multi-pary and RBAC. 3. Agents call remote APIs for alot of those tools. Native OS doesn’t really parse web traffic to decide if a request is safe or not. OS sandboxing is good for host security, but not necessarily for governing business logic or AI agents

smashini8• 17 days ago

So Linux can prevent an agent from opening /etc/passwd.

Linux cannot stop an agent from calling:

POST /wire-transfer amount=5,000,000

quixoticaxolotl• 17 days ago

One benefit is that this can run in serverless / sandboxed containers where OS primitives are not exposed or heavily limited. I immediately thought of Cloudflare Workers, which runs on V8 and exposes WASM-only interfaces, using Workers AI.

Further, servers still have hosting value, but any business running agents is almost certainly going to want a sandbox that limits what code runs for agentic work, so targeting _sandbox_ environments is probably the better bet long-term. And, yes, you could implement your proposal in any chroot jail or gvisor, but nobody wants to get their hands dirty finnicking with that - programmatic access control beats file-based access control for the simple reason it's managed for you.

If anything, my critique of OP's implementation is actually the opposite of yours: they've chosen the right primitive and layer, but people really need contextual access control rather than RBAC. Sort of like ongoing zero trust. If it was possible to inspect the context, decide if it was a bad idea to allow the tool call, without exposing the decider to untrusted context, you could have something that really changes things.

smashini8• 17 days ago

Completely agree, though the LLM part of the scanner can help with that contextual part of the analysis.

Runtime enforcement already exists (the embedded governor wraps tool calls in-process); extending it with a quarantined contextual evaluator like you describe would the logical next step.

Thanks for the feedback, actually will raise an issue on that to explore

bureado• 17 days ago

The user separation isn’t even necessary, as far as I’ve seen in the projects in https://github.com/bureado/awesome-agent-runtime-security

pelagicAustral• 17 days ago

haha! WHAT!? So, we had agents that came with a default setting to request for specific permission to perform an action, then we said "screw it!", we need speed and everybody started coding and releasing agents out in the wild to do whatever they want unchecked... and now we have a product that brings back the safeguards... A few years ago we have abstraction after abstraction coming in the way of blocking actual development (js ecosystem bloat), and now we have layer upon layer for coding with AI...

ucsandman• 17 days ago

this is cool I'm working on a similar project called DashClaw. Great work!

christkarani• 17 days ago

great stuff working in a similar project that enforces guardrails at runtime

Zie_Mordecai• 17 days ago

Really great idea, simple yet effective.

Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities

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