Introducing CaneCorso: An AI Application Firewall Built for Real Workflows

AI has officially crossed the line from experiment to infrastructure.

Email flows into copilots. Documents feed RAG pipelines. Support tickets trigger agents that can take action. The convenience is real—and so is the risk.

What hasn’t caught up is security.

Most security models were built for a world where inputs were predictable and trust boundaries were well-defined. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, untrusted content flows directly into systems that can reason, decide, and act.

That’s exactly where things get interesting—and dangerous.


When Good Data Carries Bad Instructions

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI security is that it’s a model problem. It’s not. It’s a workflow problem.

Attackers don’t need to break in anymore. They ride along with legitimate data—emails, PDFs, tickets, knowledge base entries—and inject instructions that your AI system may interpret as truth.

Think about what that means in practice:

  • A support ticket that contains hidden instructions
  • A PDF with embedded prompt injection
  • A knowledge base entry that poisons RAG outputs
  • An approval workflow manipulated through summarization

Layer in human behavior—blind trust, over-privileged access, weak validation—and you’ve got a system primed to fail in ways that traditional controls simply won’t catch.

CaneCorsoAI


A More Rational Approach to AI Security

CaneCorso™ takes a different path.

Instead of trying to block everything suspicious (and breaking workflows in the process), it follows what’s described in the Rational AI Security model —security that behaves more like an immune system than a wall.

That means:

  • Detecting and isolating threats without stopping the system
  • Treating all inbound content as untrusted by default
  • Preserving business continuity while reducing risk
  • Producing measurable, auditable outcomes

This isn’t theoretical. It’s a direct response to how AI systems actually behave in production.


One Control Plane for AI Workflows

At its core, CaneCorso gives you a shared AI Application Firewall—a single control plane that sits between your workflows and your models.

Instead of every team building its own brittle filters, you get consistent, reusable protection across:

  • Email triage and analysis
  • RAG pipelines and knowledge systems
  • Document AI and OCR ingestion
  • Support and ticketing workflows
  • Agent-driven automation

The platform delivers:

  • Runtime decisions: allow, sanitize, tokenize, or block
  • Privacy controls: redact or tokenize sensitive data before model exposure
  • Audit-ready logs: reasons, scores, and evidence you can actually use
  • Adversarial validation: Injection Scanner proves controls before and after deployment

This isn’t just about stopping attacks—it’s about making security operationally usable.


How It Works (Without Breaking Everything)

CaneCorso is built around a simple but effective model:

  1. Connect the workflow
    Mailboxes, agents, or document pipelines send raw content through a single control point.
  2. Evaluate risk
    The system analyzes both security threats and privacy exposure in real time.
  3. Apply the right action
    Policies determine whether content is allowed, sanitized, tokenized, or blocked.
  4. Keep work moving
    Safe content continues downstream with context, scores, and auditability intact.

The key difference? It doesn’t rely on hard blocking as the default.

Inline tokenization replaces only the unsafe portion of content—meaning the workflow continues, the business operates, and the risk is neutralized.


Why This Matters Right Now

The perimeter has moved.

AI systems don’t just process data—they act on it. That turns every input into a potential control decision.

The threat landscape outlined in the workflow map highlights the shift:

  • Indirect prompt injection from internal or trusted sources
  • Multimodal attacks hidden in images, PDFs, or OCR text
  • Human-in-the-loop deception during approvals
  • Over-privileged workflows amplifying impact

These aren’t edge cases. They’re becoming normal operating conditions.


Measurable Security, Not Assumptions

One of the most important shifts CaneCorso introduces is moving security from belief to proof.

The Injection Scanner continuously tests workflows against adversarial scenarios, providing measurable evidence that controls work:

  • Before deployment
  • After changes
  • During audits or customer reviews

That matters for engineering teams. It matters for security teams. And it definitely matters when someone asks, “How do you know this is safe?”


Final Thoughts: Security That Matches Reality

For years, security teams have had to choose between protection and usability.

In the AI era, that trade-off doesn’t hold up.

CaneCorso is built on a simple idea: protect the workflow without breaking it. That means embracing how AI systems actually work—messy inputs, probabilistic outputs, and human decision-making in the loop.

If you’re deploying AI in any meaningful way, the question isn’t whether you’ll face these risks.

It’s whether you’ll be ready when you do.


Learn More

To learn more about CaneCorso, schedule a demo, or discuss your environment:

Update on PromptDefense Suite and AI Security Research

Last week, I discussed why and some of how we built the new PromptDefense Suite

This week, we are discussing the product’s future internally and how we might go to market. This is mainly due to two new capabilities we have built into the product. 

The first is an API and workflow automation mechanism. This allows organizations to stand up a single instance of PromptDefense and then use it to protect multiple AI/agent workflows. The code no longer has to be embedded directly in the project; instead, all defensive capabilities and logging can be accessed via an API instance. The API is robust and supports API key restrictions that tie into a rules engine, so that different workflows can have different trust models and actions pre-assigned in an audit-friendly way. 

Secondly, we have developed a licensing mechanism that covers protected workflows and skips the per-seat, per-token models that seemed too confusing for most firms looking for these kinds of tools. They told us they wanted a simpler licensing approach, and we developed a new licensing mechanism to make it easy, manageable, and auditable. Our testers have been calling it a win! 

As we continue with the beta-testing process and lock down our decisions about where the product is going, the news that drove us to create it continues to flow in. More of our clients are working on agents and AI-integrated workflows, which require this level of protection. While we continue to develop PromptDefender, we are also working to develop and release extended frameworks for AI model, agent, and product management, along with policies, procedures, and vendor risk assessment tools for these frameworks, for our vCISO clients. We’re also busy researching ongoing compliance implementation for AI workflows and agents, and should have more on that shortly. 

In the meantime, if you want to discuss AI or agent security, risk management, or other relevant topics, please reach out. We would love to talk with you and help align our modernization capabilities with your emerging needs. You can always email us at info@microsolved.com or call us at +1-614-351-1237. 

As always, thanks for reading. Stay safe out there, and stay tuned for more updates. 

Third-Party Authentication Inventory Worksheet

We often get asked for worksheet questionnaires to help organizations inventory their third-party applications and the underlying authentication mechanisms. 

As such, we have developed a template for our clients and others to use for this purpose. 

You can easily distribute this worksheet to each part of the business or group, empowering them to complete it for each of their third-party applications. 

Once they return the data, you can extract it into any aggregation tool or vendor monitoring system you use. If you don’t have those tools available, you can process and monitor them manually using this easy spreadsheet for each line of business. 

You can get the template spreadsheet here

As always, we hope these tools are helpful. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. 

Introducing ClawBack :: Data Leak Detection Powered By MicroSolved

Cb 10We’ve worked with our clients and partners to put together a world-class data leak detection platform that is so easy to use that most security teams have it up and running in less than five minutes. No hardware appliance or software agent to deploy, no console to manage and, best of all, affordable for organizations of any size.

In short, ClawBack is data leak detection done right.

There’s a lot more to the story, and that’s why we put together this short (3 minute) video to describe ClawBack, its capabilities and why we created it. Once you check it out, we think you’ll see just how ClawBack fits the mission of MSI to make the online world safer for all of us.

View the video here.

You can also learn a lot more about ClawBack, its use cases and some of the ways we hope it can help you here. On that page, you can also find pricing for three different levels of service, more videos walking you through how to sign up and a video demo of the platform.

Lastly, if you’d like to just get started, you can visit the ClawBack Portal, and select Register to sign up and put ClawBack to work immediately on providing detection for your leaked data.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be talking more about what drove us to develop ClawBack, the success stories we’ve had just while building and testing the platform, and provide some more specifics about how to make the most of ClawBack’s capabilities. In the meantime, thanks for reading, check it out and if you have any questions, drop us a line.

MicroSolved, Inc. Releases Free Tool To Expose Phishing

MSI’s new tool helps organizations run their own phishing tests from the inside.

We’re excited to release a new, free tool that provides a simple, safe and effective mechanism for security teams and administrators to run their own phishing tests inside their organization. They simply install the application on a server or workstation and create a url email/sms/etc. campaign to entice users to visit the site. They can encode the URLs, mask them, or shorten them to obfuscate the structures if they like. 

The application is a fully self contained web mechanism, so no additional applications are required. There is no need to install and configure IIS, Apache and a database to manage the logs. All of the tools needed are built into the simple executable, which is capable of being run on virtually any Microsoft Windows workstation or server.

If a user visits the tool’s site, their session will create a log entry as a “bite”, with their IP address in the log. Visitors who actually input a login and password will get written to the log as “caught”, including their IP address, the login name and the first 3 characters of the password they used.

Only the first 3 characters of the password are logged. This is enough to prove useful in discussions with users and to prove their use, but not enough to be useful in further attacks. The purpose of this tool is to test, assess and educate users, not to commit fraud or gather real phishing data. For this reason, and for the risks it would present to the organization, full password capture is not available in the tool and is not logged.

“Organizations can now easily, quickly and safely run their own ongoing phishing campaigns. Instead of worrying about the safety of gathering passwords or the budget impacts of hiring a vendor to do it for them, they can simply ‘click and phish’ their way to higher security awareness.”, said Brent Huston, CEO & Security Evangelist of MicroSolved. “After all, give someone a phish and they’re secure for a day, but teach someone to phish and they might be secure for a lifetime…”, Mr. Huston laughed.

The tool can be downloaded by visiting this link or by visiting MSI’s website.