How Korvalis reads a session's intent, and how temporary access works
People ask me two things about Korvalis more than anything else. How does it actually know a session is dangerous? And what does “temporary access” really mean, technically? Both answers are simpler than they sound, so here they are without the marketing gloss.
What Korvalis watches
Korvalis installs inside your own AWS account. It does not sit between your team and your cloud as a proxy, and your traffic never leaves your environment to reach us. It connects using a role you grant, reads what is happening in your sessions, and acts inside your account.
When someone opens a session on a server, everything they do produces a stream of activity. Korvalis subscribes to that stream and passes it to a small function running in your own account. That function looks at the session as it happens, not after the fact.
The point is to judge the session, not to pattern-match single commands. A blocklist of “dangerous commands” fails in both directions. It misses the destructive thing phrased in a way you did not predict, and it blocks the harmless thing that happens to look scary. Reading the intent of the whole session is what lets Korvalis tell “an engineer debugging a slow query” apart from “a session that is about to drop the database.”
Rules, AI, or both
You choose how strict the judgment is. Korvalis runs in one of two modes.
Hybrid mode combines fast rules with intent analysis. The rules catch the obvious, well-understood cases immediately, and the analysis handles the ambiguous ones. This is the default, and it is what most teams want.
AI-only mode leans entirely on reading intent, with deeper context analysis of what the session is doing. It is the right choice when your risk is less about a known list of bad commands and more about judgment calls.
Either way, you start in observe mode. Korvalis watches and tells you what it would have done, but does not touch anything. You get to see it be right about your real traffic before you ever let it act. When you are comfortable, you turn on termination, and from that point a session that turns destructive gets cut on its own, in seconds.
There is also a maintenance window. Planned work, like a migration that involves deleting things on purpose, is exactly when you do not want an overeager guard pulling the plug. You can open a window for a set number of hours, do the risky work, and let protection snap back on automatically when it closes.
How temporary access works
The second half of Korvalis is about who gets to touch production in the first place.
The normal setup at most small teams is that a handful of people hold standing access to everything, forever, because setting up anything finer felt like too much work. That is the permission nobody remembers granting until it is the one that gets abused. Unit 42 has reported that around 99% of cloud identities are over-permissioned, and that lines up with what teams actually admit to.
Temporary access flips the default. Instead of holding keys all the time, someone requests access when they need it, for the task in front of them. Once it is approved, Korvalis issues short-lived credentials tied to that request. Those credentials work for a set window and then stop working. There is nothing to remember to revoke, because expiry is the default state, not a cleanup task.
Under the hood these are standard short-lived cloud credentials with a hard expiry attached. When the window is up, they are dead. If someone tries to use an expired grant, it simply fails. No standing key sitting in a shell history or a CI config for months, waiting to become a problem.
This is also what makes handing access to a contractor or a vendor safe. You grant exactly the task, it expires on its own, and you never end up with a permanent account you have to remember to delete after they leave.
How the two fit together
Temporary access shrinks the number of sessions that can do damage at all. Intent-based termination catches the damage when one of those sessions goes wrong anyway. One narrows the door, the other watches what comes through it.
If you want to see which pieces come in which plan, the pricing page lays it out, and the short version of why we built any of this is here. When you are ready to try it on your own account, join the waitlist.