Pincer

About

Pincer-MCP is a robust security gateway designed to eliminate the 'Lethal Trifecta' vulnerability in agentic AI systems. It implements a unique 'blindfold' security model, ensuring agents never directly handle sensitive API keys. Instead, agents use ephemeral proxy tokens, while Pincer manages and encrypts the real credentials in a two-tiered vault system, decrypting them only just-in-time for API calls and scrubbing them from memory immediately afterward. This architecture provides enterprise-grade security, fine-grained access control, and tamper-evident auditing for AI agent interactions with external services, including secure GPG key management.

Key Features

• Hardware-backed master key storage via OS-native keychains (macOS, Windows, Linux).
• Fine-grained per-agent, per-tool access authorization policies.
• 5 GitHub stars
• Proxy Token Architecture for credential isolation, ensuring agents never see real API keys.
• Tamper-evident audit logs with SHA-256 chain-hashing for all tool calls.
• Just-In-Time (JIT) decryption of secrets, followed by zero-footprint memory scrubbing.
• Secure GPG key management, allowing agents to sign or decrypt data without key exposure.

Use Cases

• Protecting sensitive API keys and database credentials from compromise in agentic AI systems.
• Managing and distributing API access to multiple AI agents with distinct permissions and rate limits.
• Enabling AI agents to perform secure cryptographic operations like GPG signing or decryption without exposing private keys.