Core Concepts
Architecture
Cerbera AI is a lightweight local proxy deployed to each device through your MDM. All traffic from a device to AI tools, whether from a browser, a desktop app, or a local agent, passes through the proxy before it reaches the provider. That is where discovery, monitoring, redaction, and blocking happen.
Rules are defined centrally in the Cerbera cloud and pulled by the agent, which caches them locally so enforcement keeps working even offline. For the full picture, see How It Works.
Workspaces
A Workspace represents a single organization in Cerbera. For Cerbera AI, a workspace contains:
- The fleet of devices running the proxy
- The inventory of AI tools, models, agents, and MCP servers discovered
- The rule catalog and default policies
- Alerts and activity, and the privacy settings that govern what is collected
Core Concepts
The Proxy
A lightweight local program installed via MDM. It performs TLS interception with a per-device certificate (Cerbera holds no root CA) so it can inspect encrypted AI traffic. Median latency is under a millisecond, so it is transparent in normal use.
AI Discovery
The inventory of AI in use across the fleet: browser assistants, desktop apps, coding agents and CLIs, the underlying models, and MCP servers. Cerbera maintains the catalog of what can be detected and keeps it current as new tools appear.
Rules & Actions
A firewall-style catalog of rules, plus custom rules. Each rule targets AI providers, user groups, or specific behavior, and takes one of four actions: allow, monitor (log only), redact (redact secrets before they leave the device), or block (stop the request and show the user why).
Agent Controls
Behavior-based signals for AI agents: commands that open a remote shell, access to credential files, agents running with approvals disabled, and personal (non-enterprise) account usage on tools like Claude and ChatGPT.
MCP Governance
Discovery and risk scoring for the Model Context Protocol: which MCP servers employees connect to, how risky each one looks, and rules to allow or block them.
Alerts & Activity
What a rule produces when it matches. By default an alert records only that a rule matched, for which user, at what time. Optional logging of the request body is governed by the privacy model. See Dashboards & Alerts.
Privacy Model
Privacy by design. By default only metrics reach Cerbera. Logging a request body requires both an organization-wide setting and a per-rule setting, and reading it requires a time-boxed, audited data request. See Privacy.
How the Pieces Fit
Deploy
Roll out the proxy through your MDM. See Deployment.
Discover
Run in monitor-only mode to inventory AI usage with zero user impact.
Define rules
Translate policy into allow, monitor, redact, or block rules.
Act on alerts
Review activity, automate remediation, and export to your SIEM.
