GhostPermission — AI Agent Payment Security Gateway

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  Server-side payment authorization with trusted pricing, policy checks, and PayPal Sandbox verification.

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  Backend verifies the product and enforces trusted pricing and limits.

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  Backend checks agent permissions, resource sensitivity, destination trust, approvals, redaction, and action safety.

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  Analyzes action sequences to detect unsafe workflows and prevent unauthorized operations.

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  Enforces security policies for restricted data, confidential transfers, unknown destinations, and agent tool permissions.

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  Tracks outbound data flows and displays policy decisions for destination security.

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  Incident Evidence Status Action Tracks security incidents, evidence, and investigation status for suspicious or policy-violating activities.

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  Maintains a verifiable hash-chained audit log of security and payment events.

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  Displays runtime risk distribution and policy-trigger analytics from recorded security events.

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  Shows PayPal Sandbox and AI provider status.

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  Configure agents, classify resources, set destination trust, and define approved merchants, products, and limits.

Inspiration

AI agents are becoming capable of taking actions on behalf of users, including initiating payments. But giving an AI agent the ability to act does not automatically mean it should have permission to spend money. We built GhostPermission around one core principle: every sensitive action should be checked against explicit security policies before execution.

What It Does

GhostPermission is an AI Agent Payment Security Gateway designed to add an authorization layer between AI-driven requests and payment execution.

The project aims to provide:

Policy-Based Authorization: Evaluate proposed actions against configurable security rules.

Human Approval: Require explicit approval for sensitive or high-risk actions.

PayPal Sandbox Integration: Connect the authorization workflow to PayPal's test-payment environment.

Auditability: Record authorization decisions and payment workflow events for review.

AI-Assisted Requests: Use an AI provider to turn natural-language requests into structured action proposals, which are then validated by the policy engine.

How We Built It

GhostPermission combines a web interface, a backend authorization workflow, policy evaluation, and audit logging. The intended architecture separates AI-generated proposals from the final authorization decision. The backend must validate requests and approvals rather than trusting values supplied by the browser.

PayPal Sandbox is intended to demonstrate the payment workflow without using real money. The AI component helps interpret requests, while deterministic security policies remain responsible for deciding whether an action can proceed.

Challenges

A key challenge is ensuring that an AI-generated request cannot bypass authorization controls. Another is separating user approval from client-side input so that an untrusted request cannot simply claim to be approved. Integrating payment workflows also requires careful handling of credentials, API errors, duplicate requests, and payment status verification.

What We Learned

This project highlights why AI agents need controlled permissions, server-side validation, explicit approval workflows, and auditable actions. AI can help propose an action, but it should not independently grant itself permission to execute that action.

What's Next

Our next steps are to validate the complete PayPal Sandbox workflow, connect and test the AI provider, strengthen authorization and approval checks, and demonstrate both allowed and blocked payment scenarios with clear audit records.

Built With

• artificial
• css
• cybersecurity
• express.js
• intelligence
• javascript
• node.js
• paypal
• react
• restapi