🛡️ AetherWall

The Enterprise Agent-to-MCP Gateway

AetherWall is an open-source, edge-deployable gateway for securing agent-to-agent and agent-to-MCP communications. It provides a production-grade security pipeline combining traffic inspection, LLM-powered validation, and policy-based routing.

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Architecture

┌──────────────┐     ┌─────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐
│  External    │────▶│   APISIX    │────▶│   AetherWall       │────▶│  Internal    │
│  Agent       │     │  (Edge      │     │   Gateway          │     │  Services    │
│              │◀────│   Router)   │◀────│                    │◀────│  / MCP       │
└──────────────┘     └─────────────┘     │  ┌──────────────┐  │     └──────────────┘
                                         │  │  LLM Guard   │  │
                                         │  │  (Verifier)  │  │
                                         │  ├──────────────┤  │
                                         │  │  LangGraph   │  │
                                         │  │  (Validator) │  │
                                         │  ├──────────────┤  │
                                         │  │  Qdrant      │  │
                                         │  │  (Memory)    │  │
                                         │  └──────────────┘  │
                                         └────────────────────┘

Security Pipeline Flow

1. Policy Pre-Check — Verify agent identity and destination against aether.yaml allow-lists
2. Verification — Stateless payload scanning via LLM Guard (PII, toxicity, prompt injection)
3. Validation — LangGraph council deliberation for complex/risky requests
4. Routing — Approved requests forwarded via APISIX + LiteLLM translation

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Quick Start

# 1. Clone and configure
git clone https://github.com/supulkalhara/aether.git
cd aether
cp .env.sample .env   # Edit with your secrets

# 2. Start the full stack
docker compose up -d

# 3. Pull a local model (first run only)
docker compose exec ollama ollama pull qwen3:8b

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Development

# Create virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install with dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest -v

# Lint & type check
ruff check src tests
mypy src

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Project Structure

aetherwall/
├── src/aetherwall/
│   ├── domain/          # Core business logic (framework-free)
│   │   ├── models.py    # Pydantic domain models
│   │   ├── config.py    # aether.yaml parsing & validation
│   │   ├── gateway.py   # Pipeline orchestrator
│   │   └── exceptions.py
│   └── interfaces/      # Abstract base classes (ports)
│       ├── router.py    # Routing interface
│       ├── validator.py # Validation council interface
│       └── verifier.py  # Security verification interface
├── tests/
│   ├── domain/          # Unit tests for core logic
│   └── interfaces/      # Interface contract tests
├── config/
│   ├── apisix/          # APISIX edge router config
│   └── litellm/         # LiteLLM proxy config
├── aether.yaml          # Gateway deployment specification
├── docker-compose.yml   # Full stack (7 services)
├── Dockerfile           # Multi-stage production build
└── pyproject.toml       # Project & tooling config

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Configuration

aether.yaml — Gateway Policy

Define agent connections, allow-lists, security settings, and validation rules:

aetherwall_gateway:
  version: "1.0"
  connections:
    - agent_identity: "Internal-Procurement"
      allowed_external: ["vendor-agents.com"]
      mcp_tools_allowed: ["check_budget"]
      rate_limit: 100_requests_per_minute
  security:
    pii_redaction:
      enabled: true
      engine: llm_guard
  validation_council:
    enabled: true
    engine: langgraph
    rules:
      - "Debate all transactions > $500 before routing."

.env — Secrets

See .env.sample for all available variables.

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Stack

Service	Purpose	Port
AetherWall	Core gateway	8000
APISIX	Edge router	9080
LiteLLM	LLM translation proxy	4000
Ollama	Local LLM inference	11434
Qdrant	Vector DB (audit logs)	6333
LLM Guard	Security scanner	8080
etcd	APISIX config store	2379

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License

MIT