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PALOPALO FRAMEWORK

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n8n Community Discussion Draft

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n8n Community Discussion Draft#

Title#

Architecture preview: a governance control plane for agent authority, policy gates, HITL and evidence in n8n

Post#

Hello n8n community,

We are exploring PALO-AI as a complementary governance control plane for agentic n8n workflows. This is an architecture and developer preview, not a verification request and not a production connector announcement.

The problem we are testing is simple: an AI agent may be able to choose a tool, but that does not establish that the agent is authorized to perform the exact operation against the exact resource, host and arguments.

The proposed model has four integration patterns:

  1. Visual Governance Decision Gate — a removable canvas node that turns a proposed tool call into a canonical Action Claim and exposes allowed, approval-required and denied branches.
  2. Governed Executor — the stronger target pattern in which credentials and allowlisted execution remain behind an unavoidable PALO-controlled boundary.
  3. Digest-Bound Human Approval — approval is bound to the exact immutable claim, then revalidated before a one-time secure resume.
  4. Workflow Admission — assess workflow JSON, governance coverage and a versioned workflow digest before activation or execution.

The current v2.5 full-cycle developer preview includes versioned JSON contracts, an official-SDK MCP reference server, Rego v1 policy, replay controls, a SQLite-backed preview registry and ledger, exact-claim approval, one-time execution capabilities, trusted receipts and authoritative outcome verification. The unpublished n8n-nodes-palo-ai 0.2 package provides both the visual decision gate and a governed-action prototype with Verified, Review Required, Denied and Execution Failed outputs.

Important limitations: the visual gate is advisory, and the governed-action prototype is bypassable whenever another workflow path retains the protected credential or direct tool. Production identity, authenticated approval resume, non-bypassable connector isolation, distributed durability, KMS/HSM custody and verified/certified connectors remain under development. We are not claiming that every n8n tool call is intercepted or that package 0.2 is published or n8n-verified.

I would value feedback on:

  • Does the Action Claim contain the right n8n execution and tool context?
  • Does the distinction between an allowed decision and a verified outcome remain understandable on the canvas?
  • Where should the boundary sit between native n8n HITL/guardrails and portable PALO policy?
  • Which self-hosted hook or executor pattern would make bypass resistance practical?
  • What would you require before testing this in a disposable local environment?

Architecture, capability matrix and package source:

https://github.com/sev7enITA/PALOframework/tree/main

Three-minute architecture preview: media/palo-ai-n8n-architecture-preview-3min.mp4 (script and storyboard in media/).

We are also looking for a small number of design partners with one safe, non-production workflow and one mock or reversible tool action. Please use the repository feedback/design-partner templates and do not share secrets or production data.

The intake questions and safety boundaries are collected in docs/community/palo-ai-feedback-design-partner-form.md. This post is an invitation to discuss the architecture, not a request for n8n verification or connector review.

n8n orchestrates what automation does. PALO makes explicit whether the action was authorized—and whether its declared effect was later verified.