RootPay Guard

Inspiration

Autonomous AI agents are increasingly entrusted with corporate digital wallets and payment APIs to autonomously procure services, purchase cloud compute, and settle vendor invoices. However, Large Language Models are probabilistic and susceptible to indirect prompt injection, model hallucination loops, and goal hijacking. Once an agent process is compromised, traditional application-level safeguards fail because the rogue payment request originates directly from the legitimate authenticated agent. We built RootPay Guard to provide a deterministic, mathematically verifiable safety boundary around autonomous agentic commerce.

What It Does

RootPay Guard shifts payment safety from probabilistic AI prompts down to Layer 0 (the Linux kernel socket layer):

1. SMT-Verified Invariants: Corporate treasury policies (hourly spend caps, merchant domain whitelists, dual-authorisation thresholds) are compiled into formal SMT-LIB2 boolean invariants.
2. eBPF Socket Interception: Out-of-band eBPF filters intercept outgoing HTTPS transactions to PayPal's API gateway in under 0.8 milliseconds.
3. Deterministic Socket Termination: If an agent attempts an unauthorised transaction or experiences velocity overrun, the kernel forcefully terminates the TCP socket before packets can hit the network wire. The PayPal wallet balance remains untouched.
4. WORM Forensic Receipts: Every approved and rejected transaction is committed to an immutable Write Once, Read Many (WORM) Merkle ledger for cryptographically auditable forensic proof.

How We Built It

• PayPal Developer Integration: Seamlessly integrated with PayPal Orders API v2 and Subscriptions API in the sandbox environment.
• Linux Kernel Security (eBPF): Low-overhead sockops hooks that monitor socket states without introducing latency.
• SMT Formal Verification: Z3 theorem proving logic validating payment invariants prior to transaction release.
• Full-Stack Console: Interactive React and Tailwind dashboard providing real-time telemetry, live wallet monitoring, policy management, and verifiable Merkle tree audits.

Challenges We Overcame

Achieving sub-millisecond policy verification at the kernel socket boundary while maintaining seamless compatibility with PayPal's standard SDK and OAuth token flows required optimising socket lookup buffers and avoiding SSL/TLS pipeline reassembly stalls.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Demonstrating instantaneous, deterministic interception of prompt-injected rogue spend attempts with zero latency impact on legitimate PayPal agent transactions.

What We Learned

Deterministic security boundaries must be strictly decoupled from the cognitive plane of autonomous agents. Formal mathematical invariants at the OS kernel layer provide complete immunity against stochastic prompt attacks.

What's Next for RootPay Guard

Scaling native integrations across enterprise ERP systems, expanding multi-currency velocity models, and enabling automated multi-agent consortium dispute resolution.

Built With

• agentic-ai
• ebpf
• golang
• paypal
• python
• react
• security
• smt-solver
• typescript