Free Why I Rebuilt AI Security From Scratch In Pure C 2026

In the past 18 months, I've analyzed over 30 different AI security tools. Lakera Guard, Prompt Security, Robust Intelligence, HiddenLayer, Pangea, Cloudflare AI Gateway... the list goes on.

...you haven't secured your AI. You've added another attack surface.

I watched security scanners flag vulnerabilities in the very tools meant to protect AI systems. I saw "guardrails" become bypass opportunities. I observed overhead that made production deployment impractical.

What if we applied network security principles to AI?

Networks have firewalls. DMZs. Zone-based architectures. Cisco IOS commands. Hardware-accelerated filtering.

So I built SENTINEL Shield — an AI security layer designed like network infrastructure:

Yes. And so is securing AI systems with slow, bloated, dependency-heavy code.

C forces discipline. Every allocation is explicit. Every buffer has a size. There's no garbage collector hiding memory bugs — they crash immediately in development, not silently in production.

I've written 23,113 lines of C. Not a single malloc without a corresponding free. Every string operation bounds-checked. Static analysis on every commit.

The result? A security layer that doesn't become a security liability.

Source: Dev.to