The 5 Principles

The five durable promises Inviolet keeps. They come into force in order as you climb the maturity model — one principle per level — and the first, intent, is the foundation the other four stand on.

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1. Learn the intent behind every prompt.

Every request an agent makes carries an intention — a labeled, human-owned purpose the policy layer can evaluate. Inviolet captures the intent behind every prompt: the signal identity and PAM can’t see, and the foundation the other four principles stand on. The more traffic it sees, the sharper it gets. Catches: Agents taking an action nobody modeled — unauthorized data reads, unapproved writes, purposes nobody described.

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2. Test before enforcing.

Every rule can run in shadow first. The decision is logged as if enforced; the actual request still goes through. Tune against real traffic, then flip the switch. Catches: Over-enforcement — policies that would block legitimate work if deployed live without tuning.

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3. Least access as the system learns.

Grant the least access an intention needs — specific columns under specific conditions, never a whole data source. Route the gray zone to a human, and turn each decision into standing policy. Access tightens as the system learns. Catches: Blanket connection-level grants that expose columns outside the intended scope, and the “permit because we don’t know” silent yes.

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4. Agents never touch credentials.

What reaches the agent is never the real key. Inviolet brokers a short-lived, intention-scoped lease against your existing PAM — the credential stays in your vault, the agent gets a one-shot token bound to a single declared intention. Catches: Stolen, leaked, prompt-injected, or memorized credentials — the entire class of attacks that depend on the agent ever holding the actual secret.

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5. Impossible to bypass.

Every path an agent could take is covered — direct egress, every LLM host, every runtime — and every one is proven: bypass-tested in CI, monitored in your SIEM, attestable to an auditor. There is no way around the system. Catches: The agent that skips the gateway entirely — a direct API call, an unmediated host, a runtime nobody wrapped.

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Read next

For the full narrative on each principle, see the public principles page. Each principle maps onto one of the five levels of the maturity model.