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You don't need a security background. You don't need to know what a capability token is. You do need to understand what AI agents are — that they call tools, read files, and make decisions. Everything beyond that, we build from scratch.

This section takes you from "I use AI tools but I don't know how they're secured" all the way to understanding how an MCP gateway enforces least privilege, information flow control, and cryptographic identity for AI agent teams.

Part I: The Threat Model

#TopicWhat you'll understand
0What Agents Actually DoTool calls, not just chat — why agents are processes, not users
1Why Prompts Aren't SecuritySystem prompts as access control — and why they fail
2Prompt InjectionThe fundamental unsolvable problem in AI security
3The Multi-Agent SurfaceHow delegation, shared context, and tool chains multiply risk
4What a Gateway Can and Cannot DoInfrastructure-level enforcement vs semantic-level attacks

Part II: OS Security Primitives

#TopicWhat you'll understand
5Agents as ProcessesWhy the OS analogy works — isolation, scheduling, identity
6CapabilitiesDennis & Van Horn to Capsicum — unforgeable tokens for access control
7Privilege RingsRing 0/1/2, deny-wins, why outer rings can't escalate
8Information Flow ControlBell-LaPadula, lattices, taint labels — preventing data exfiltration
9The Microkernel IdeaMach → L4 → seL4 — small trusted base, everything else is userland

Part III: Cryptographic Identity

#TopicWhat you'll understand
10Digital SignaturesEd25519 — how signing works and why agents need it
11Decentralized IdentifiersDIDs and did:key — identity without a registry
12Capability TokensCBOR encoding, attenuation, expiry — why not JWT
13Delegation ChainsHow a leader issues narrower tokens to specialists
14Post-Quantum ReadinessML-DSA, hybrid signatures, algorithm agility

Part IV: The MCP Protocol

#TopicWhat you'll understand
15JSON-RPC and TransportsThe wire format — JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP, stdio, WebSocket
16Tools, Resources, PromptsThe three MCP primitives and what flows through each
17The Security ChokepointWhere enforcement happens — handle_call_tool as the system call boundary
18Upstream and ProxyHow the gateway mediates access to external MCP servers
19Agent-to-Agent ProtocolA2A for inter-agent communication — agent cards, task lifecycle

Part V: Formal Verification

#TopicWhat you'll understand
20What Kani ProvesBounded model checking, SAT solvers, "all inputs within bounds"
21Reading a Kani HarnessAnnotated walkthrough of a real proof from navra
22TLA+ SpecificationsProtocol-level model checking — what temporal logic adds
23Property TestingWhere proofs end and tests begin — complementary approaches
24The Verification GapWhat remains unproven and why

Part VI: Privacy Engineering

#TopicWhat you'll understand
25PII Detection with RegexFast pattern matching — SSNs, credit cards, emails
26Named Entity RecognitionONNX models for detecting names, addresses, organizations
27The Privacy RouterRouting, short-circuit, language detection — coordinating 5 detectors
28False Positives and ThresholdsThe tradeoff between safety and usability
29Compliance MappingEU AI Act, SOC2, ISO 42001 — what the blackbox addresses

How to read this

Part I stands alone — stop after Chapter 4 and you'll understand why navra exists and what problem it solves.

Part II explains the classical OS security concepts that navra adapts — capabilities, rings, IFC, microkernels. If you're a security person, skim this. If you're an AI person, read it carefully.

Part III covers the cryptography behind agent identity and capability tokens — Ed25519, DIDs, CBOR, delegation chains.

Part IV explains the MCP protocol and where security enforcement happens in the request lifecycle.

Part V covers formal verification — what Kani and TLA+ prove about navra's security properties, and what they don't.

Part VI covers privacy engineering — how content filtering works at the gateway layer, from regex to ONNX models.

Go in order within each part. After Part I, the other parts can be read in any order based on interest.