Learn
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
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | What Agents Actually Do | Tool calls, not just chat — why agents are processes, not users |
| 1 | Why Prompts Aren't Security | System prompts as access control — and why they fail |
| 2 | Prompt Injection | The fundamental unsolvable problem in AI security |
| 3 | The Multi-Agent Surface | How delegation, shared context, and tool chains multiply risk |
| 4 | What a Gateway Can and Cannot Do | Infrastructure-level enforcement vs semantic-level attacks |
Part II: OS Security Primitives
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Agents as Processes | Why the OS analogy works — isolation, scheduling, identity |
| 6 | Capabilities | Dennis & Van Horn to Capsicum — unforgeable tokens for access control |
| 7 | Privilege Rings | Ring 0/1/2, deny-wins, why outer rings can't escalate |
| 8 | Information Flow Control | Bell-LaPadula, lattices, taint labels — preventing data exfiltration |
| 9 | The Microkernel Idea | Mach → L4 → seL4 — small trusted base, everything else is userland |
Part III: Cryptographic Identity
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Digital Signatures | Ed25519 — how signing works and why agents need it |
| 11 | Decentralized Identifiers | DIDs and did:key — identity without a registry |
| 12 | Capability Tokens | CBOR encoding, attenuation, expiry — why not JWT |
| 13 | Delegation Chains | How a leader issues narrower tokens to specialists |
| 14 | Post-Quantum Readiness | ML-DSA, hybrid signatures, algorithm agility |
Part IV: The MCP Protocol
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | JSON-RPC and Transports | The wire format — JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP, stdio, WebSocket |
| 16 | Tools, Resources, Prompts | The three MCP primitives and what flows through each |
| 17 | The Security Chokepoint | Where enforcement happens — handle_call_tool as the system call boundary |
| 18 | Upstream and Proxy | How the gateway mediates access to external MCP servers |
| 19 | Agent-to-Agent Protocol | A2A for inter-agent communication — agent cards, task lifecycle |
Part V: Formal Verification
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | What Kani Proves | Bounded model checking, SAT solvers, "all inputs within bounds" |
| 21 | Reading a Kani Harness | Annotated walkthrough of a real proof from navra |
| 22 | TLA+ Specifications | Protocol-level model checking — what temporal logic adds |
| 23 | Property Testing | Where proofs end and tests begin — complementary approaches |
| 24 | The Verification Gap | What remains unproven and why |
Part VI: Privacy Engineering
| # | Topic | What you'll understand |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | PII Detection with Regex | Fast pattern matching — SSNs, credit cards, emails |
| 26 | Named Entity Recognition | ONNX models for detecting names, addresses, organizations |
| 27 | The Privacy Router | Routing, short-circuit, language detection — coordinating 5 detectors |
| 28 | False Positives and Thresholds | The tradeoff between safety and usability |
| 29 | Compliance Mapping | EU 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.