Project Showcase: UMAI Core CE – A Lightweight eBPF/XDP Firewall Built on Aya to Secure AI Agent Ingress Paths

[Entelijan-Research]

Hey everyone! Want to share a project we've been building entirely on top of the Aya framework: UMAI Core CE.

We are leveraging Rust and XDP hooks to build a lightweight firewall that secures the sub-surface ingress boundaries of the multi-agent AI ecosystem (specifically monitoring and filtering tools that bind to 0.0.0.0, like local MCP hosts and self-hosted OpenClaw instances).

The core engine uses a pinned lockless BPF hash map (umai_intel_map) to verify source vectors directly inside the network driver path, executing native packet drops (XDP_DROP) before the Linux stack ever allocates socket buffers (sk_buff). This gives the local host wire-speed boundary protection without charging a user-space CPU performance tax that would slow down real-time inference.

Since we are optimizing this for fast, machine-to-machine production layouts, we would love to get some ruthless architectural feedback from the Aya community on our map update logic and verifier bounds.

Check out the repo and local playground here:https://github.com/UMAI-Community/umai-core-ce