Agentic Daisy AI Agent Firewall

FAQ

Does this plugin call any external services?

No. All policy decisions run as plain PHP on your server. Nothing leaves your site.

What happens to my data when I uninstall?

Nothing, by default. The audit ledger is evidence, so it stays. If you want uninstall to remove all Agent Firewall tables and options, opt in first: wp option update adaf_delete_data_on_uninstall 1.

Do agents need a special user account?

Each agent is linked to a WordPress user and can never exceed that user’s capabilities. Policies and scopes only restrict further, so link agents to least-privilege users.

Why does it require WordPress 6.9?

The Abilities API, the structured way AI agents act on WordPress, shipped in 6.9. Intercepting it is a core feature of this firewall.

How do I stop all agents immediately?

Use the kill switch: the “Emergency stop: pause all agents” button at the top of every Agent Firewall screen. While engaged, every agent action – reads included – is denied with a clear machine-readable reason, and every denial still lands in the audit ledger. Held approvals stay put; nothing is lost. Release it from the same place when the incident is over. It is a hard deny rather than hold-for-approval so a runaway agent cannot flood your approval queue while you investigate.

Can an agent approve its own held actions?

No. Approval endpoints require the manage_options capability. The firewall’s own admin routes are exempt from agent gating precisely so a human can still step in when an agent is misbehaving.

What do agents see when an action is blocked?

A structured error, not a bare refusal. Denials carry a reason (policy, out_of_scope, rate_limited, untracked_automation, lockdown), a retryable flag, and a plain-language explanation of what would change the answer. Rate limits say that waiting clears them; scope and policy denials say that retrying will not help and a site administrator has to act. Held actions report that they have not executed and should not be resubmitted. Rate-limit denials also carry a retry_after value and a standard Retry-After header saying when a slot frees, and held actions can be polled at /pending/{id}/status with the agent’s own token. Well-behaved agents act on this instead of hammering the endpoint.

Are there any policies out of the box?

The policy list starts empty, but the site is not unprotected. When no rule matches, the firewall falls back to built-in defaults: reads are allowed; creating or updating posts, pages and media is allowed; every deletion is held for approval; and any write to settings, user accounts, roles, plugins, themes, templates, global styles or widgets is held for approval even when it is a create or an update. Anything the firewall cannot categorise is held rather than allowed. The Policies screen lists these defaults so an empty policy list is not mistaken for no protection.

How do I write a policy rule?

Use the rule builder on the Policies screen, which offers only values that can actually occur, or switch it to JSON if you prefer. A rule matches on any combination of action category (create, update, delete, read), entity type, entity id, ability name, and source, and carries a decision: ALLOW, DENY, REQUIRE_APPROVAL, or LOG_ONLY. Rules are tried in order and the first match wins, so a rule with no match conditions must be last. A rule may also carry a sliding-window write limit instead of a decision.

Each policy is either global or scoped to a single agent, chosen with the “Applies to” control and changeable later. At equal priority an agent’s own policy is consulted before a global one.

The full grammar is available over the API at /wp-json/agenticdaisy-firewall/v1/policies/schema, which returns the JSON Schema, the accepted values for each dimension, and the defaults.

Can I copy my policies to another site?

Yes. The Policies screen has “Export policies (JSON)” and “Import policies” buttons. Importing only ever adds: existing policies are never edited or deleted, and an entry identical to one you already have is skipped. Policies scoped to a single agent attach to an agent with the same name on the destination site; if none exists, the entry is skipped and the import report says so, because silently applying an agent-specific rule to every agent would change what it protects.

How do I check what a rule will actually do?

Use “Test an action” on the Policies screen. Pick an action, an entity type and optionally an agent, and it reports what would happen and which rule decided it – or that no rule matched and a built-in default applied. It is a dry-run: nothing is written, no rate limit is consumed, and no agent is affected. This matters because rules are tried in order and the first match wins, so reading a list of policies does not always tell you which rule governs a given action.

After the fact, the Activity Ledger’s “Decided by” column reports the same thing for every action the firewall has already seen, so you can trace any verdict back to the rule that produced it. You can also filter the ledger by deciding policy, to see what one rule has actually been doing, or by “Built-in defaults” to see the actions no rule covered yet. The Policies screen lists any rule that has decided nothing at all, which catches a rule quietly shadowed by an earlier one – though a rule can also be unfired simply because nothing has attempted what it guards against, so it reports the fact rather than telling you to remove anything. If you have set a retention window, that list says so and names how far back the ledger still reaches, since a rule whose matches were pruned looks the same as one that never matched. That provenance is covered by the ledger’s hash chain, so it cannot be rewritten without detection.

What happens if I write an invalid rule?

It is rejected when you save it and nothing is stored. Structural problems, such as a decision that is not one of the recognised values, name the exact position of the error. Beyond that, the plugin rejects rules that would silently do nothing: a rule carrying neither a decision nor a limit, and any rule made unreachable by an earlier rule that already matches everything. If a stored rule is somehow unrecognisable at evaluation time, the action is held for approval; the engine never fails open.

Can I stop the audit ledger growing forever?

Yes, but it is off by default because deleting audit records is not something a plugin should do to you unasked. Set a retention window under “Ledger retention” on the Activity Ledger screen and a daily job trims entries older than that. Because the ledger is hash-chained, pruning re-anchors the chain rather than breaking it, and every prune writes its own entry recording how many entries were removed and when – retention that left no trace of itself would be a way to erase an audit trail. Actions still waiting for approval always keep their records. Snapshots are removed with their entries, so actions older than the window can no longer be undone.

Both jobs are also available to WP-CLI, along with a summary: wp agent-firewall status reports the ledger size, its oldest entry, whether the chain verifies and whether history has been trimmed; wp agent-firewall verify checks the chain and exits non-zero if it has been tampered with, so you can run it from cron and be told rather than having to look; wp agent-firewall prune applies the window, with --dry-run to see what would go first.

Can I turn the alert emails off?

Yes. The Activity Ledger screen has a checkbox: “Email me when an agent trips a rate limit or an ability changes definition”. It is on by default, sends only to the site administrator, and is throttled so a runaway loop produces one message rather than hundreds. Turning it off stops the mail; the anomalies are still recorded in the ledger either way. These are event alerts about your own site – the plugin sends no newsletters, digests or marketing of any kind.

What is the strict application-password setting?

Integrations that authenticate with application passwords carry no agent identity, so they bypass agent policy. By default each such write is recorded in the Activity Ledger with the “untracked” status – it names the route, the action, and the acting WordPress user, and it joins the tamper-evident hash chain like every other entry. Set adaf_block_app_password_writes to 1 to reject such writes entirely and force automation onto agent tokens.