Enterprise Guardrails

Input Validation and Sanitization

  • [ ] Enforce strict JSON Schema validation for all ingress paths, including workflow input, resume payloads, tool arguments, and MCP resources.
  • [ ] Reject invalid or unknown fields instead of silently coercing malformed payloads to empty maps.
  • [ ] Add field-level constraints: required fields, enums, length limits, numeric bounds, and regex validation.
  • [ ] Canonicalize inputs before validation so equivalent malformed values cannot bypass rules.
  • [ ] Add sanitizers for untrusted HTML, Markdown, URLs, filenames, and shell-like strings before they reach prompts or tools.

Prompt Injection and Trust Boundaries

  • [ ] Mark user input, MCP resources, retrieval results, and tool outputs as untrusted by default.
  • [ ] Prevent untrusted content from overriding system or workflow instructions.
  • [ ] Detect common prompt-injection and jailbreak patterns before model invocation.
  • [ ] Add policy checks that block tool use when the prompt attempts data exfiltration, privilege escalation, or instruction override.

Anti-Hallucination and Factuality

  • [ ] Add an evidence-backed response mode for high-risk tasks.
  • [ ] Require citations or explicit provenance when answers depend on provided context or tool results.
  • [ ] Add abstention behavior when the system lacks sufficient evidence.
  • [ ] Add optional verification passes for critical outputs before returning results.
  • [ ] Detect unsupported claims in model output and either block them or downgrade confidence.

Tool Safety

  • [ ] Validate tool arguments against real schemas before dispatch.
  • [ ] Reject extra properties and semantically invalid arguments before calling external tools.
  • [ ] Sanitize tool results before they are reused as prompt content.
  • [ ] Add idempotency, retry policy, rate limiting, and blast-radius controls for external actions.
  • [ ] Add per-tool approval gates for risky or destructive operations.

Policy Engine and Risk Controls

  • [ ] Introduce a central policy layer for model usage, tool access, data classes, and tenant boundaries.
  • [ ] Support per-agent and per-step allow/deny rules.
  • [ ] Add risk tiers for low-risk chat, medium-risk automation, and high-risk external actions.
  • [ ] Require human approval for actions above a configurable risk threshold.

Security, Auditability, and Compliance

  • [ ] Redact secrets and sensitive fields from logs, traces, workflow history, and events.
  • [ ] Add immutable audit logs for prompts, tool calls, approvals, policy decisions, and blocked actions.
  • [ ] Record policy decision reasons so denials are explainable.
  • [ ] Support retention and deletion policies for workflow state and history.
  • [ ] Add tenant isolation guarantees across prompts, traces, cached context, and tool results.

Evaluation and Monitoring

  • [ ] Build a guardrail regression suite covering validation failures, prompt injection, hallucination, and unsafe tool usage.
  • [ ] Add adversarial test fixtures and red-team prompts.
  • [ ] Track metrics for blocked requests, hallucination rate, policy denials, and unsafe tool-call attempts.
  • [ ] Add dashboards or structured telemetry for guardrail outcomes.

PII Protection

PII Detection and Classification

  • [ ] Detect common PII types locally before any LLM call, including email, phone, address, DOB, SSN, payment card data, and auth tokens.
  • [ ] Support both pattern-based detection and field-aware classification.
  • [ ] Tag values and fields with sensitivity levels such as pii, restricted_pii, and secret.
  • [ ] Track provenance for sensitive data: user-provided, tool-derived, or model-generated.

PII Redaction and Tokenization

  • [ ] Add a pre-prompt redaction pipeline so direct identifiers are never sent to the LLM by default.
  • [ ] Support disclosure policies per field: allow, mask, tokenize, or drop.
  • [ ] Replace sensitive values with stable placeholders when the model needs structure but not raw identifiers.
  • [ ] Rehydrate placeholders only after the model returns, and only when policy allows it.

PII-Safe Validation Flow

  • [ ] Validate PII locally with deterministic rules instead of sending raw values to the LLM for validation.
  • [ ] Pass only derived facts to the model, such as email_present, email_valid, or has_us_phone_number.
  • [ ] Add a secure mapping layer for placeholder-to-real-value lookup outside the model boundary.
  • [ ] Prevent raw PII from being echoed back in model responses unless explicitly allowed.

PII Policy and Governance

  • [ ] Define policy rules such as "never send restricted PII to external LLMs".
  • [ ] Restrict which tools and agents may access or export PII.
  • [ ] Add configurable retention windows and deletion workflows for PII-bearing runs.
  • [ ] Add audit events for when PII is detected, transformed, transmitted, blocked, or deleted.

Suggested Implementation Order

  • [ ] Phase 1: strict ingress validation, local PII detection, pre-prompt redaction, and tool-argument enforcement.
  • [ ] Phase 2: policy engine, prompt-injection defenses, audit logging, and output filtering.
  • [ ] Phase 3: evidence-backed response mode, verification passes, guardrail telemetry, and red-team evals.