Comparing categories, not products
Products differ and change, so I compare kinds of tools, not vendors. If you use a specific product, check it yourself; some do more than their category usually does.What each kind of tool answers
- IAM, OAuth scopes and roles answer “who is calling?” and “may this caller use this API?” That is their main job and they do it well. Scopes are usually coarse and long-lived, so they rarely answer whether one specific action with one amount may run now.
- An API gateway answers whether a request may pass and how fast: routing, quotas, network policy, TLS. It usually does not judge the business content of one action.
- LLM guardrails answer whether text looks harmful, off topic, leaking data, or like a prompt injection. They filter text, not actions.
- A general policy engine can answer almost any authorization question, if you write the rule and feed it the facts. Where it is enforced decides whether it can be skipped.
- An agent framework’s confirmation step puts a person in the loop, often as a click inside the agent’s own process.
- Parmana answers whether one specific action, with its exact parameters, may run now under a versioned policy, requires a person’s signed approval for it, and signs a record of what ran and what was refused that anyone can verify offline.
Where Parmana adds something
- A person per action, not per role. A scope grants a class of actions for a long time. A Parmana approval covers one action on one resource, up to one amount, once, until it expires, and is signed by a registered approver. Every agent action needs one, reads included, at any amount.
- The agent does not hold the system credentials. The gateway holds them and releases each action only after checking the signed authorization. An in-agent confirmation can be skipped by an agent that holds the keys. Parmana’s check cannot be skipped by an agent that does not.
- Evidence, not logs. Most tools keep logs that are trusted as stored. Parmana signs a record of each action and each refusal, which an auditor or customer can verify with only a public key.
- Governed rules. Policies, approvers and external connectors change only when one person proposes and a second approves with a step-up signature, and each change is signed. Elsewhere this depends on your own process, often code review.
Where Parmana is weaker
- It does not read text. Parmana does not detect prompt injection, toxic output or data leakage in what the model says. Use a guardrail for that. Parmana limits what an injected agent can do, not what it says.
- Only actions that go through it. Parmana enforces nothing at the network level. An agent with other credentials, or a system reached another way, is outside it.
- A person in the loop is slow by design. Every action waits for a human signature. On top of that, an approved request took 24 to 32 seconds in production.
- It sees fewer facts. Most facts an agent declares are not checked against another system; they can only cause a refusal. A policy engine fed from your own systems can use facts Parmana does not see. Registering a business system as a source is built, but no real one is connected yet.
- Approvers are not yet scoped. Any trusted approver can approve any action. IAM can scope who approves what more finely today.
- Few ready-made connectors. Paytm, HubSpot, GitHub and Slack are built in. Anything else goes through an endpoint you run and register, or a connector you write. An API gateway already fronts all your APIs.
- Young, with a small operational surface. No metrics, tracing or dashboards yet. Key custody is local files or AWS KMS only. IAM products and API gateways have years of production use and operations tooling behind them.
Using them together
Parmana does not replace any of these. It sits after them, in front of the actions. A typical stack, outside in:- IAM authenticates the agent and the people, and gives the agent a Parmana caller key only, not system credentials.
- An API gateway in front of Parmana handles TLS, routing, quotas and network policy.
- Guardrails check the model’s input and output.
- Parmana checks each proposed action against its policy, requires a signed approval, releases it with the credentials it holds, and signs the record.
- Your logging and SIEM collect Parmana’s records with everything else; the records stay verifiable on their own.
What it does not do
- It does not replace IAM, an API gateway, guardrails or your policy engine.
- It does not judge whether the model is right, safe or honest.
- It does not govern an agent that holds its own credentials.
- It does not prove two credentials are two people.
- It does not yet limit approvers to particular actions, or cap totals per day.