# vex-sidecar
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<strong>VEX-Sidecar: Transparent Interception Proxy for the VEX Protocol</strong>
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`vex-sidecar` is a high-performance interception proxy designed to bridge legacy AI agents and services into the **VEX (Verifiable Entity Execution)** trust ecosystem. It encapsulates raw HTTP/LLM traffic into cryptographically-signed **VEP (Viking Enveloped Packets)**, providing mathematical proof of intent, authority, and hardware-rooting without requiring manual integration into black-box systems.
## 🚀 Overview
In a VEX-hardened environment, every agent action must be verifiable. Legacy systems often lack the native "Silicon Boundary" logic required to generate hardware-anchored proofs. `vex-sidecar` solves this by acting as a "trust gateway":
1. **Intercepts** standard HTTP/REST requests from legacy agents.
2. **Analyzes** the intent and generates a `ContextPacket`.
3. **Encapsulates** the payload into a binary VEP envelope.
4. **Routes** the verifiable packet through the VEX hardware layer (TPM/Secure Enclave) for signing.
5. **Forwards** the completed, verifiable capsule to the desired endpoint.
## ✨ Key Features
- **Zero-Code Integration:** Bring existing agents into the trust trinity without changing a single line of legacy code.
- **Protocol Encapsulation:** Native support for the VEP v2 binary format and CHORA Capsule Protocol v1.
- **Automatic Provenance:** Automatically attaches hardware-rooted identity and execution metadata to every request.
- **Asynchronous & High Performance:** Built on `axum` and `tokio` for minimal latency impact.
## 🛠 Usage
Set the following environment variables to configure the proxy:
- `VEX_API_URL`: The endpoint of your local VEX control plane (default: `http://localhost:8000`).
- `VEX_TARGET_URL`: The upstream service that processes VEP packets (default: `http://localhost:3000/v2/vep`).
Then simply point your legacy agent's API calls to the sidecar address (default: `http://localhost:8080`).
## 🧱 Part of the VEX Trinity
`vex-sidecar` works in harmony with the core VEX stack:
- [`vex-core`](../vex-core) - Cryptographic primitives and Merkle types.
- [`vex-hardware`](../vex-hardware) - TPM and Secure Silicon integration.
- [`vex-runtime`](../vex-runtime) - Policy enforcement and verification.
## ⚖️ License
Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.