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**Authority, not credentials: Policy-checked, attributable, revocable, provable AI agent authorization.**
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[](LICENSE)
[](https://github.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal/releases)
[](https://caracal.run)
[](https://www.bestpractices.dev/projects/12350)
[](https://scorecard.dev/viewer/?uri=github.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal)
[](https://codecov.io/github/garudex-labs/caracal)
**Supported By:**
<a href="https://resources.github.com/github-secure-open-source-fund/"><img src="public/programs/gsof.png" alt="GitHub Secure Open Source Fund" height="28"/></a>
<a href="https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-open-source-program-spring-2026-cohort#caracal"><img src="public/programs/vossp.png" alt="Vercel OSS Program" height="28"/></a>
<a href="https://f.inc/canopy"><img src="public/programs/finc.png" alt="Founders Inc. Canopy Online" height="28"/></a>
<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/startups"><img src="public/programs/mfs.png" alt="Microsoft for Startups" height="28"/></a>
<a href="https://mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/project/9cfe285b-7006-4610-84a8-1a52b0dff662"><img src="public/programs/lfx.png" alt="LFX Mentorship 2026" height="28"/></a>
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---
## Why Caracal
> **"Gateway-mediated agents never hold upstream credentials. Every action is policy-approved before it runs, scoped to exactly what was delegated, revocable in one call, and recorded as tamper-evident evidence."**
AI agents are entering production with **long-lived API keys in their environment**, **broader access than any task needs**, and **no answer to "which agent did this, under whose authority?"**
One prompt injection, leaked key, or runaway loop turns an assistant into an incident. Security reviews block launches. Auditors have nothing to inspect.
Existing tools weren't built for this: identity providers register agents but never see their actions, secrets managers hand the credential to the workload, and API gateways route traffic without deciding anything. Caracal is the missing control plane. It decides **what an agent may do** before every action, proves **what it actually did**, and **shuts it down instantly** when something goes wrong.
---
## How It Works
For gateway-mediated calls, agents never receive upstream credentials. They carry **mandates**: short-lived, signed grants of authority that can only shrink as work is delegated. Caracal's gateway injects the real credential at call time, so the upstream credential never enters the agent process.
```mermaid
flowchart LR
A[Agent] -- requests authority --> STS[Policy decision<br/>default deny]
STS -- short-lived mandate --> A
A -- presents mandate --> GW[Caracal Gateway]
GW -- real credential injected --> API[Tool / API / MCP server]
STS -. every decision .-> AUDIT[(Tamper-evident audit)]
GW -. every call .-> AUDIT
```
| Capability | Outcome for your team |
| ------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **No standing secrets** | For gateway-mediated calls, upstream credentials stay at the edge and are injected only for the request. |
| **Delegation that only narrows** | Agents hand work to sub-agents, never with more access than they hold. Least privilege is enforced, not requested. |
| **Decisions before actions** | Default-deny policy evaluates every request _before_ it reaches a resource, not flagged in a log afterwards. |
| **One-call kill switch** | Revoke an agent and everything it started loses access at once. No waiting for tokens to expire. |
| **Human approval for risky actions** | Approval gates hold high-risk operations for an authenticated approver before they execute. |
| **Evidence, not just logs** | An append-only, tamper-evident trail of every decision, exportable for SOC 2, EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and OWASP Agentic reviews. |
---
## Why Not Something Else?
| Alternative | What's missing |
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Identity providers** | Register agents; never see their actions. No per-call decisions, no delegation limits, no evidence. |
| **Secrets managers** | Hand the credential to the workload. A compromised agent is a leaked secret. |
| **API gateways** | Route and rate-limit; carry no authority model and no delegation semantics. |
| **Building it yourself** | A proxy + vault + policy engine gets you plumbing, not narrowing delegation, revocation propagation, or a tamper-evident audit chain. Then you maintain it forever. |
Caracal is standards-native: OAuth 2.0 token exchange (RFC 8693), OPA policy, and MCP integrations. It fits the stack you already run instead of replacing it.
---
## Fast Enough To Govern Everything
Per-request authorization usually means a latency tax. Caracal's is smaller than most gateways spend on plain proxying — measured end to end on a single 4-vCPU VM running the packaged stack with stock configuration:
| Metric | Result |
| -------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- |
| Governed request latency — mint + policy + enforce | **p50 17 ms · p95 23 ms** |
| Policy evaluation (128,000 evals under full load) | **~1 ms, zero errors** |
| Peak throughput | **139 req/s** |
| Sustained (8-minute soak) | **133 req/s · 11.5M governed calls/day** |
| Hard errors across the 87,000-request suite | **0** |
| Tamper-evident audit trail at 100% CPU | **Lossless — zero dropped events** |
Every request in these numbers was individually authorized, cryptographically minted with replay protection, and audit-logged. Measured on v1.0.0; the full methodology lives in [Performance and Scalability](https://docs.caracal.run/operations/performance-benchmarks/). Results depend on hardware and workload shape, so establish your own baseline before committing to a limit.
---
## Works With Your Stack
TypeScript, Python, and Go SDKs. Drop-in verification for **MCP servers**, Express, FastAPI/ASGI, and Go net/http. Runs anywhere Docker runs: your infrastructure, your data.
Read the full documentation at [docs.caracal.run](https://docs.caracal.run).
---
## Get Started
### Prerequisites
- Docker Desktop 4.27+ or Docker Engine 25+ with Compose v2
- Git 2.x
### Install Released Version
> Check [GitHub Releases](https://github.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal/releases) for the latest available tag.
> Pin a version: `--version vX.Y.Z` on Unix or `-Version vX.Y.Z` in PowerShell.
<details>
<summary><strong>Linux</strong> (amd64 / arm64)</summary>
```bash
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal/main/install.sh | \
sh -s -- --version v1.0.0
```
</details>
<details>
<summary><strong>macOS</strong> (Intel / Apple Silicon)</summary>
```bash
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal/main/install.sh | \
sh -s -- --version v1.0.0
```
</details>
<details>
<summary><strong>Windows</strong> (amd64) PowerShell</summary>
```powershell
$installer = "$env:TEMP\install.ps1"
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Garudex-Labs/caracal/main/install.ps1 -OutFile $installer
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File $installer -Version v1.0.0
```
</details>
### Start the stack
```bash
caracal up # start all services, override with `CARACAL_VERSION=vX.Y.Z caracal up`
caracal status [--ready] # probe all services
caracal down # stop; add -v to remove volumes
caracal purge # interactive cleanup (containers, volumes, config, runtime, caches)
```
Before your first sign-in, enable Google/GitHub OAuth or email/password (with SMTP) in `$CARACAL_HOME/caracal.env`, then allowlist your email. See [Enable Console Sign-In](https://docs.caracal.run/get-started/install-caracal/#enable-console-sign-in). Once the stack is up, the console is served at [http://localhost:3001](http://localhost:3001).
```bash
caracal allowlist add you@example.com # admit your first console user, Port:3001 (Console UI)
caracal run -- node worker.js # workload execution
```
---
## Contributing
See [CONTRIBUTING.md](./CONTRIBUTING.md) for setup, workflow, tests, and pull request standards.
---
## Maintainers
<table width="100%">
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<a href="https://github.com/RAWx18" target="_blank">
<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/RAWx18?s=150" width="120" alt="RAWx18"/><br/>
<strong>RAWx18</strong>
</a>
<p>
<a href="https://github.com/RAWx18" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-100000?style=flat&logo=github&logoColor=white" alt="GitHub"/>
</a>
<a href="https://linkedin.com/in/ryanmadhuwala" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/LinkedIn-0077B5?style=flat&logo=linkedin&logoColor=white" alt="LinkedIn"/>
</a>
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<a href="https://github.com/Slo-Pix" target="_blank">
<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/Slo-Pix?s=150" width="120" alt="Slo-Pix"/><br/>
<strong>Slo-Pix</strong>
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<a href="https://github.com/Slo-Pix" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-100000?style=flat&logo=github&logoColor=white" alt="GitHub"/>
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<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/shubh465" target="_blank">
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---
## Security & Trust
Caracal is built to be the enforcement point you can audit, not another black box: a published [threat model](governance/THREAT_MODEL.md), signed releases with verified assets, OpenSSF Best Practices and Scorecard tracking, and a tamper-evident audit chain at runtime. Start with the [Enterprise Security Readiness](https://docs.caracal.run/security/enterprise-readiness) review checklist.
Report vulnerabilities privately through [SECURITY.md](./.github/SECURITY.md).
---
## License
Caracal is open-source software licensed under the **Apache-2.0** License. See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for details.
**Developed by Garudex Labs.**
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