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Posted by Jonathanfishner 4 hours ago

Show HN: OneCLI – OSS credential gateway that keeps secrets out of AI agents(github.com)
hey HN, Jonathan and Guy here, creators of OneCLI (https://onecli.sh/). OneCLI is an open source vault for AI Agents.

Traditional vaults are used to store your secrets and, on demand, provide them to you all in a secure way, trusting the person to keep them safe. We figured that in the agent's world, this is not the case, as you don't know what happens with the secret after it's delivered to the agent, or where it was saved. Or maybe someone even manipulated them to hand them over...

From that understanding, we decided to build a network gateway that sits between your AI agents and the services they call. OneCLI matches the request by host/path, verifies the agent should have access, swaps the placeholder for the real credential, and forwards the request. the secrets set inside the OneCLI vault, encrypted on rest, or could fetch in realtime from your bitwarden / 1password wallets.

Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e5pbPEzZfY.

We started working on this by accident, even though our careers were in the security space. We were working on a devtool called ChartDB, an open-source DB tool. When OpenClaw took off back in January, we started using it to orchestrate agents on top of ChartDB. We quickly understood there is a big issue around auth. Agents need credentials to do real work, but to give them those secrets would not be the best idea. they keep them in their memory and also write them down to local files and their sessions as plain text. And we knew that agents can easily be fooled into giving up those API keys/secrets. So we needed some way to control the agent and stop prompt injections from tricking it into using its services for an attacker's benefit. Not providing the keys to the agent + adding alerts or human-in-the-loop for sensitive operations, in case someone manipulates the agent, and access logs are being audited.

We use it ourselves daily. My OpenClaw runs my day across Attio, Gmail, and my calendar, with human-in-the-loop approval on sensitive actions. The approval is enforced at the network layer, so it holds whether the agent goes through MCP, CLI, curl, or code it wrote on the fly. Guy uses it to review PRs but can't merge without his approval.

Companies mostly use it for coding agents currently, which get creative about finding ways to elevate their permissions to reach the goal. With OneCLI, it doesn't matter what the agent finds: if the request isn't in policy, it will not go through.

The proxy is written in Rust, the dashboard is Next.js, and secrets are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest. Everything runs in a Docker container. It works with any agent framework (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes or anything that can set an HTTPS_PROXY).

It won't stop an agent from misusing access it legitimately has, so scope policies tightly!

happy to answer anything. We believe we can't trust the model to behave and have to set deterministic rules to stay in control. Comments welcome!

52 points | 23 comments
osinix 2 minutes ago|
This is the same old good way from database world. A db client never touches the disk, but sends requests to a server who owns it. Same in your product. Keys are separated from agents and if needed, agents must send request to a proxy who owns them. Old proven design. Good luck.
sandeepkd 2 hours ago||
It works great for static credentials. As a product I think about adding couple more things that might be helpful here (Btw I am not the client for this, I just happen to know them as practical problems)

1. Support for OAuth Client credentials - Gateway does the OAuth dance to get the access token, this is quite practical and even useful in case of regular services running across clusters and sharing the same clientId-secretId

2. Support for request retries on certain failures and short circuiting in other cases

Jonathanfishner 1 hour ago|
thanks, both are useful.

1. we support OAuth apps today, and we're growing the catalog based on demand. we support rotating and refreshing tokens for those.

2. I'd like to understand your case better. sitting in the request path means we could own retry mechanisms, but I'm curious what made you think of it, what kind of use cases did you have in mind?

sandeepkd 1 hour ago||
Almost every API caller has to add the logic for retries based on the response codes, centralizing it with the gateway optimizes the repetitive code across the clients.

Trip breaker patterns are good for resource usage on both sides (client and server) when you know things are not working. In addition to that it also saves on cost for the clients if every call is billed irrespective of success or failure.

oliver236 8 minutes ago||
why not just use 1password
emilsoman 29 minutes ago||
How does it compare to agent-vault and clawpatrol?
redbridgerock 1 hour ago||
Oo this is interesting, blocking it on the network level is nice
doctorpangloss 2 hours ago||
does the agent control the environment that onecli is running in? (yes)
Jonathanfishner 2 hours ago|
yes the agent controls its environment which is exactly why nothing sensitive should live there. The gateway and the real secrets sit outside the sandbox. that said, not holding the secrets doesn't make the agent harmless. It still acts autonomously, and it can use whatever access those credentials grant. do you see the second half as the bigger risk? curious how people are thinking about it.
stephantul 1 hour ago||
It is hilarious to see most comments are people peddling their own products more or less directly.
rvz 1 hour ago|
This is what happens when building software goes to 0.

"Build it and they will come" now works well for competition:

- If you build it (and it is not useful) they won't come.

- If you build it (and it is useful and successful) they will come and copy you to build their own.

notaharvardmba 2 hours ago||
oauth, saml, oidc accomplish the same thing in a way more mature way, so if you’re already using SSO just do that instead of adding another point of failure..
mjg59 2 hours ago|
No they don't - you're still giving the agent a static token that can be exfiltrated and used elsewhere.
hmokiguess 50 minutes ago||
doesn't the token has an expiry window though? if you're using oidc/sso with aws for example it is short lived and can be revoked
frank-bee 2 minutes ago||
[flagged]
winterrx 3 hours ago|
nice launch. i have started to use a secrets manager (infisical) recently for my different projects and it's been really helpful. are your customers solo hackers, small startups or large enterprises that are looking for this kind of solution? i like to see competition in the space
aliasxneo 2 minutes ago||
Curious how you justify their pricing? Last I checked the $/identity extended to machine accounts which absolutely blew my mind.
bstsb 3 hours ago||
+1 on infisical. brilliant self-hosted offering, i love their CLI and it works well with CI pipelines
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