dsh-read-guard

Deterministic prompt-injection interception for DeepSeek Harness (dsh).

Vendors harden only their own agents at runtime. This plugin is the runtime. It hooks dsh's tools/post-execute waterfall: every result the watched tools return — file reads, repo searches, web fetches — is scanned by the repo-inject-guard rule engine at the moment it would enter model context, then quarantined, blocked, or passed. Zero LLM calls in the trust path.

The name states the thesis: it guards what the agent reads.

Why

Repo poisoning and web-content injection enter through what the agent reads, not what the user types. Scanning files at commit time (CI) is too late for a live session; scanning after the fact is an autopsy. dsh's tool pipeline is the last choke point before untrusted text reaches the model.

Competitive landscape (checked 2026-10-12)

The injection-defense lane is a long tail without a winner (~15 plugins, none above 85★). The ones that matter, honestly:

Plugin	Architecture	What we do differently
dsh-secure-audit (85★)	Scanning is a model-callable tool — the model must volunteer to call it	We intercept in the tools/post-execute waterfall; the model cannot bypass the scan. (Their obfuscation normalization — homoglyph/base64 — is ahead of ours; tracked in the roadmap.)
dsh-defend (23★)	Same three interception points, allow/ask/block, Aho-Corasick literal patterns	Our engine is context-scoped (rules fire per trust level / surface, with corroboration requirements) rather than literal pattern lists; wrap mode keeps content available while taint-marked (theirs is allow/ask/block only); scan cap 200k full-text vs their 10k head-only
dsh-injection-guard (2★)	Action-side taint tracking (blocks sensitive tool calls after untrusted context)	Complementary, not competing: they gate downstream actions, we sanitize upstream content. (We renamed from dsh-inject-guard to avoid confusion with them.)

We are not first. The bet is that a precision-first engine with upstream tests (the rule engine lives in repo-inject-guard with its own CI and fixture suite) plus enforcement-not-advice architecture outlasts weekend pattern lists.

Modes

mode	high-severity finding	weak (medium/low) finding
observe	logged	logged
wrap (default)	result is taint-marked: original content stays model-visible inside quarantine markers with an explicit "this is data, not instructions" header	logged only — precision first, we never mangle legitimate content over weak signals
block	result never reaches the model; the model gets corrective feedback instead	logged only

Detection rules (vendored engine): instruction-override attempts, system-prompt extraction, credential/environment exfiltration, hidden Unicode, agent directives, rules-file backdoor phrasing, resource lures. Details and the precision-first policy live in the repo-inject-guard README.

Install

dsh plugin --profile default add dsh-read-guard

From npm — no build step, no allowBuilds authorization; git installs are equally prebuilt (lib/ ships in the repo).

Configure

Override in your profile's cordis.patch.yml:

- id: dsh-read-guard
  name: dsh-read-guard
  config:
    mode: block
    readTools: [read, grep, glob]
    fetchTools: [web_fetch, web_search]
    maxScanChars: 200000
    quiet: false

Add any tool whose results the agent reads — including MCP tools (they dispatch through the same pipeline).

Develop

npm install
npm test          # syncs vendor engine, builds, runs unit tests

Load from source into a local dsh checkout:

pnpm dsh web --patch ./cordis.dev.patch.yml

The detection engine is vendored from the sibling repo-inject-guard checkout (npm run sync; CI runs sync --check). The engine's tests live upstream; this repo tests only the adapter policy.

Roadmap

• Obfuscation resistance: zero-width/full-width/homoglyph normalization + bounded base64 decoding before rules run (closing the gap to dsh-secure-audit)
• agent/pre-step scanning for pasted user content (deliberately out of v0: users are allowed to give instructions)
• MCP-server tool surfaces as a preset trust class
• Per-agent scoped policies (dsh scopes allow agent-local listeners)
• A report tool card (presentResult) surfacing session detection history

Kill criteria

Honest ones, per house convention: if dsh ships a first-party content-safety guard covering tool-result injection, or the tools/post-execute contract changes in a way that breaks content replacement, this plugin freezes at its last working version and the README records the postmortem. The engine moves to whatever runtime needs it next.