Pipelock: Agent Firewall for AI Coding Tools

The Problem: AI Agents Are Credentialed, Networked, and Trusted

When you run Claude Code, Cursor, or any agentic coding tool, you’re handing it something dangerous: a live environment loaded with secrets. Your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is sitting there. Your AWS credentials. Your GitHub tokens. Your .env file. The agent can read environment variables, make HTTP requests, call MCP servers, and run shell commands — all on your behalf, all in the same process that holds those credentials.

That’s a completely different threat model than a traditional web app. A web app has a defined interface. You know what it talks to. You can write static firewall rules around it. An agent decides at runtime what to do, what to fetch, and what to send. You can’t fully enumerate the attack surface ahead of time because the whole point of the thing is that it improvises.

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Demystifying: The GIF Format

We've all seen GIF files being used. They're the internet's go-to for animated imagery. I've never actually looked into the specification until recently, and I've found that it's a pretty simple file format. This makes GIF a perfect candidate for what’s becoming a recurring “Demystifying” series here.

In this article, we're going to dive into how GIF files are encoded, and some interesting quirks of the format.

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Finding Your Linux Version with uname and lsb_release

Ever wonder what Linux version is running on your machine? I commonly connect to friend's machines, or to one of my servers and I have no clue. This can make a huge difference, as some distributions use apt, and some use yum. There are two super helpful commands to accomplish figuring this out.

In this article, we're going to cover uname, and lsb_release.

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Web Phone Links

Phone numbers, everyone knows what they are. Everyone has tapped or clicked on at least one online, and noticed that it automatically pops open the phone app with the number ready to dial.

There are some interesting features of online phone links, that when used properly can make them much more useful. In this article, we'll dive into phone number links online.

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Undocumented APIs

Because I always love to push the envelope, and love learning how different services work in the background, I find myself running into undocumented APIs fairly regularly. Through writing many random bots, I've come up with a pretty nice workflow for handling, and documenting these APIs.

This article is going to cover how I typically go about the endeavor of documenting unknown APIs.

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Coreboot

BIOS

We've all seen one of these two BIOS screens upon starting a computer:

American Megatrends BIOSAward BIOS

On the left is American Megatrends' BIOS, on the right is Award's BIOS. These are the two main BIOS manufacturers, and they have almost complete marketshare when it comes to firmware on laptops and desktops. Most newer machines don't show these screens anymore, but they're typically still running one of these two pieces of software. I'm going to cover what these two pieces of software do, and an alternative to these.

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Unicode

Unicode is one of those things people don't commonly think about, but benefit from immensely. To explain why Unicode was necessary, we need to look back at the early days of computing.

Before the 80s, if you owned a IBM mainframe, you were pretty much stuck only buying IBM computers. The reason for this is that IBM computers could only talk to other IBM computers, due to there being no "standard" way to encode characters. This meant that even files made on an IBM likely couldn't be read by competitor's machines.

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Why try Python first?

As an IT guy, I get it. Learning a programming language can be daunting from an outside view. However, I feel that everyone in today's age should learn a language at some point. I hold this opinion due to how useful it can be in my daily life.

Although everyone who knows how to program has a recommendation on which language to learn first, I'm a strong advocate for the first language someone learns to be Python. I'll get into some of my reasons for this here.

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