Policies

Policies define conditions that trigger automated responses, from alerts to blocking an action entirely, and they run server-side on every signed action for real-time control over what your agents can do. Use the built-in engine or bring your own rules. Either way Asqav signs the outcome into a tamper-evident receipt, recorded by a party that is not the agent's operator.

Creating Policies

Create a policy with a name, condition, and action:

# Create a rate limit policy
curl -X POST https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "api-rate-limit",
    "description": "Limit API calls to 100 per minute",
    "action_pattern": "api:*",
    "conditions": {"rate_limit": "100/minute"},
    "action": "block_and_alert",
    "severity": "high"
  }'

# Response includes the policy id and active flag
{"id": "pol_abc123", "name": "api-rate-limit", "is_active": true, ...}

Policy Conditions

Every policy matches actions by action_pattern, a glob matched against the action_type (for example api:* or data:delete:*; * matches everything). The optional conditions object narrows the trigger further:

payload_contains and payload_regex inspect the action context, so they cannot evaluate on hash-only signs: the payload never reaches the API. Rate limits and time windows still evaluate on every sign. When a hash-only sign matches a policy that carries payload conditions, the receipt's controls_evaluated.policy entry records the limitation with payload_conditions_not_evaluated: true. See Control Attestation.

For action_pattern, the SDK resolves semantic names like sql-destructive or file-write to their glob equivalents with asqav.resolve_pattern("sql-destructive") (returns data:delete:*). See Enforcement for the full list of built-in patterns.

# Block destructive SQL (glob from asqav.resolve_pattern("sql-destructive"))
curl -X POST https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "block-destructive-sql", "action_pattern": "data:delete:*", "action": "block"}'

# Block actions containing sensitive keywords
curl -X POST https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "block-delete-operations", "conditions": {"payload_contains": "DROP TABLE"}, "action": "block"}'

# Regex match for credit card numbers
curl -X POST https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "detect-credit-cards", "conditions": {"payload_regex": "\\b\\d{4}[- ]?\\d{4}[- ]?\\d{4}[- ]?\\d{4}\\b"}, "action": "alert"}'

Policy Actions

Actions define what happens when a condition is triggered:

Listing Policies

# List all policies
curl https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key"

# Response (truncated)
[
  {
    "id": "pol_abc123",
    "name": "api-rate-limit",
    "action_pattern": "api:*",
    "conditions": {"rate_limit": "100/minute"},
    "action": "block_and_alert",
    "is_active": true,
    "violation_count": 0
  }
]

Toggling Policies

Enable or disable policies without deleting them:

# Toggle a policy between active and inactive
curl -X POST https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies/pol_abc123/toggle \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key"

# Check current state
curl https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/policies/pol_abc123 \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key"

Automatic protection

Use Policies → Automatic protection to set the violation threshold and time window. Repeated violations can suspend or quarantine an agent’s access to Asqav. These settings are available on every plan.

This is separate from incident review, where a person records an issue and its resolution. Resolving an incident does not resume an agent. Review the agent’s current status in Agents.

The counter expires after the configured window, starting with the first violation. Protection triggers when the count exceeds the threshold: a threshold of 5 triggers on the sixth counted violation. Tracking depends on Redis; a tracking failure is logged and does not itself block signing. Your application must handle Asqav’s rejected requests to stop downstream work.

curl https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/remediation/config \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ASQAV_API_KEY"

curl -X PUT https://api.asqav.com/api/v1/remediation/config \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ASQAV_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"auto_suspend_threshold": 10, "auto_suspend_window_seconds": 7200}'

PUT replaces the configuration. Include default_escalation_chain_id from the current configuration if you want to preserve that connection.

Per-action save policy

The action_type_policies table lets a regulated org set retention shape per action_type. A wire-transfer action can carry the full payload for seven years while support-ticket replies are stored hash-only for ninety days, in the same organization, without a separate cloud install.

The default behaviour, when no row matches a given action_type, is the existing org-level retention mode. The cloud applies the policy at sign time, regardless of what the SDK requested.

INSERT INTO action_type_policies (organization_id, action_type, save_mode, retention_seconds)
VALUES ('org_abc123', 'support.ticket.reply', 'hash', 7776000);

Manage policies from the terminal with asqav policies (list, create, delete).