Bharat-Shield

What is Bharat-Shield?

Bharat-Shield is the verification gate inside Aether Citadel. Every AI response that passes through /v1/intent/verify is evaluated against the original intent signature. If the response doesn’t match the intent — or matches a known attack pattern — Bharat-Shield blocks it before it reaches your users.

What It Blocks

Threat	How Bharat-Shield Stops It
Replay attacks	TTL on every intent hash — expired signatures are rejected
Intent spoofing	Response must cryptographically match the original intent hash
Hallucination injection	Response payload is verified against the signed context
Session hijacking	Intent hash is single-use — can’t be reused across users
Man-in-the-middle	HMAC-SHA256 on the response chain — tampering detected

The Verification Flow

generate_intent() → intent_hash (signed, expires in TTL)
                         │
                         ├── attached to AI request as X-Intent-Hash
                         │
              AI responds with ScaleResponse
                         │
                         ▼
             verify_response(response, original_intent_hash)
                         │
              ┌──────────┴──────────┐
              │   Bharat-Shield     │
              │                     │
         CLEARED               BLOCKED
              │                     │
       payload served         403 returned
       to user                to caller

Verdicts

When you call /v1/intent/verify, you get one of two verdicts:

Cleared

{
  "cleared": true,
  "reason": null,
  "payload": { "text": "AI output here..." }
}

The response is legitimate. Serve it to the user.

Blocked

{
  "cleared": false,
  "reason": "ExpiredIntent",
  "payload": null
}

The response was rejected. Do not serve it. Log the reason for your own audit trail.

Block Reasons

Reason	Meaning
`ExpiredIntent`	The intent hash TTL has passed
`HashMismatch`	Response doesn’t match original intent
`SignatureInvalid`	HMAC verification failed — potential tampering
`ReplayDetected`	Intent hash was already used
`MissingFields`	Required fields absent from the response

India-First Design

Bharat-Shield is tuned for Indian AI workloads:

DPDP Act alignment — blocks responses that would expose personal data patterns
Low-latency verification optimised for India AWS/Azure regions
Hindi/regional language semantic context supported in intent classification
UPI / fintech intent classes (finance, commerce) with stricter thresholds

What Bharat-Shield Doesn’t Do

To be clear about scope:

It does not moderate AI content (offensive language, toxicity)
It does not rate-limit individual users (that’s your app’s job)
It does not store the AI output anywhere — verification is stateless
It does not make AI decisions — it only verifies integrity

Getting Started

Core Concepts

Changelog

What is Bharat-Shield?

What It Blocks

The Verification Flow

Verdicts

Cleared

Blocked

Block Reasons

India-First Design

What Bharat-Shield Doesn’t Do

​What is Bharat-Shield?

​What It Blocks

​The Verification Flow

​Verdicts

​Cleared

​Blocked

​Block Reasons

​India-First Design

​What Bharat-Shield Doesn’t Do

What is Bharat-Shield?

What It Blocks

The Verification Flow

Verdicts

Cleared

Blocked

Block Reasons

India-First Design

What Bharat-Shield Doesn’t Do