Protecting the Crown Jewels with File Integrity Monitoring

Series draft — Part 6 of 15 in Hardened Agentic Stack. Outline only; expand before un-drafting.

Phase 2: Runtime Integrity — The Local Threat Model

The Problem

Agents may try to read /etc/shadow, ~/.ssh/id_rsa, or kubeconfig to escalate.

The Infrastructure Fix

Wazuh or Tetragon FIM on sensitive paths — block open/read and alert.

The Architecture Pattern

Immutable Host Boundary — filesystem no-go zones enforced on the host.

Planned sections

1. The “Oh No” moment — concrete incident or near-miss that makes the risk visceral.
2. ClawQL context — how this control protects a high-privilege local/edge agent.
3. Technical how-to — concrete configs, policies, or snippets a builder can apply.
4. Safety check — what “trusted enough” looks like once this layer is in place.

Key visuals

• Watched-path map for agent UID

Source modules (docs.clawql.com)

• security-monitoring-observability-siem
• secrets-at-rest-vault-hsm-audit

Rule of Three (keep on publish)

Layer	Takeaway
Problem	Agents may try to read /etc/shadow, ~/.ssh/id_rsa, or kubeconfig to escalate.
Infrastructure fix	Wazuh or Tetragon FIM on sensitive paths — block open/read and alert.
Architecture pattern	Immutable Host Boundary — filesystem no-go zones enforced on the host.