Canary Tokens

Embed invisible tripwires inside your agent's context. When an attacker reads or exfiltrates your agent's system prompt or tool outputs, Trappr detects it instantly — before any damage is done.

What are canary tokens?

A canary token is a unique, trackable value embedded silently inside data that should never be read by external parties. When that value appears in an outgoing request, a log, or a response — you know something accessed it that shouldn't have.

Trappr generates canary tokens scoped to your agent and embeds them transparently. You don't change your agent logic. Trappr watches the traffic and alerts you the moment a token is seen outside its intended boundary.

How it works

When your agent sends a request through the Trappr AI Gateway, canary tokens are embedded at the right moment and watched on every subsequent call.

Prerequisites

• A Trappr account with at least one API key
• An app created in the Trappr dashboard
• Your agent routed through the AI Gateway

Setup

Step 1 — Create a canary token in the dashboard

Go to Dashboard → Canary Tokens → New token. Give it a name (e.g. system-prompt-guard) and select the app it belongs to. The dashboard generates a unique token string.

Step 2 — Route LLM calls through the Gateway

Update your agent to use the Trappr Gateway endpoint. The gateway is API-compatible with OpenAI, Anthropic, and most providers.

import openai

client = openai.OpenAI(
    base_url="https://gateway.trappr.net/v1",
    api_key="<your-trappr-api-key>",
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        {"role": "user",   "content": "Summarize this document."},
    ],
)

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: "https://gateway.trappr.net/v1",
  apiKey:  "<your-trappr-api-key>",
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gpt-4o",
  messages: [
    { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
    { role: "user",   content: "Summarize this document."      },
  ],
});

curl -X POST https://gateway.trappr.net/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-trappr-api-key>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gpt-4o",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
      {"role": "user",   "content": "Summarize this document."}
    ]
  }'

Step 3 — Verify the token is active

After routing at least one request through the gateway, go to Dashboard → Canary Tokens. You should see your token listed as Active with a last-seen timestamp.

Step 4 — Configure alerts

Under Settings → Alerts, connect a Slack channel, email address, or webhook URL. When a canary is triggered, you'll receive a notification within seconds. See the Slack alerts guide for setup.

What triggers a canary alert?

A canary alert fires when a monitored value is detected in any of the following:

Viewing triggered incidents

All triggered canary events are logged under Dashboard → Incidents. Each incident shows the full execution trace, the message where the token appeared, and a timestamp. You can acknowledge or investigate incidents directly from the dashboard.

Next steps