Migrating from Custom Safety to Authensor

Many teams build custom safety checks as their agents evolve. These typically start as if-statements in the agent code, grow into a collection of utility functions, and eventually become a maintenance burden with inconsistent enforcement and no audit trail. Migrating to Authensor replaces this ad hoc infrastructure with a structured, auditable system.

Audit Your Current Safety Code

Before migrating, understand what you have. Search your codebase for safety-related code:

• Input validation functions
• Output filtering logic
• Tool call restrictions (allowlists, denylists)
• Approval gates (Slack messages, email confirmations)
• Logging of agent actions
• Rate limiting on agent operations

Document each safety check: what it protects against, where it is implemented, and how it makes decisions. This inventory becomes your migration checklist.

Map Custom Checks to Authensor Components

| Custom Check | Authensor Component | |---|---| | if-statement tool restrictions | Policy engine rules | | Regex-based input filtering | Aegis content scanner | | Output PII scrubbing | Aegis output scanning | | Manual Slack approval requests | Approval workflows | | Action logging to a database | Hash-chained audit trail | | Rate limiting per agent | Policy engine rate rules | | Anomaly detection scripts | Sentinel behavioral monitoring |

Migration Order

1. Audit trail first. Replace custom logging with Authensor's receipt system. This is the lowest-risk change: it does not affect agent behavior, and it immediately provides tamper-evident records.

2. Policy engine second. Translate your custom tool restrictions into YAML policy rules. Run in shadow mode alongside the existing checks to verify parity.

3. Content scanning third. Replace custom regex filters with Aegis detection rules. Aegis provides a consistent scanning framework with detection metadata in the audit trail.

4. Approval workflows fourth. Replace custom approval mechanisms with Authensor's workflow system. This integrates approvals with the policy engine and audit trail.

5. Monitoring last. Replace custom anomaly detection with Sentinel. This requires the most calibration time, so do it after the other components are stable.

Decommissioning Custom Code

Remove custom safety code only after confirming that Authensor produces the same decisions. For each custom check:

1. Enable the Authensor equivalent in shadow mode
2. Compare decisions for at least one week
3. Resolve any discrepancies
4. Enable Authensor enforcement
5. Disable the custom check
6. Remove the custom code after a stabilization period

The migration eliminates duplicated logic, provides a single source of truth for safety policies, and establishes an audit trail that custom solutions typically lack.