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The Vid guide

For anyone who runs an AI agent and wants to see what reaches it. Vid is free.

What Vid is, in one sentence. Vid sits on your computer between your AI agent and the model it calls, reads every call on its way through, and shows you what was hidden in it. It changes nothing and blocks nothing. Stopping is Perun.

Contents

Section titled “Contents”
  1. What Vid does, in one page
  2. Install
  3. Connect your agent
  4. Read what Vid shows
  5. What Vid does not do
  6. Your data
  7. When something does not work
  8. Glossary

1. What Vid does, in one page

Section titled “1. What Vid does, in one page”

An example. Ana runs a small accounting office. Her agent reads incoming invoices and files them. One invoice carries a line written in invisible characters: to Ana, and to anyone reading the PDF, the invoice looks ordinary. The model reads every character. Vid reads it first, undoes the disguise, and records it: one message with hidden text, from a tool result, and here is what it said. Ana sees it in vid status the same afternoon.

What happened there. An instruction an agent should never follow rarely arrives in plain words. It arrives disguised, so that a person skimming the text does not see it and a simple filter does not match it. Vid knows 42 kinds of disguise:

  • characters you cannot see (zero-width characters, Unicode tag characters, unusual spaces);
  • letters that only look Latin (a Cyrillic “а” in “pаge”);
  • encodings: Base64, hex, URL encoding, ciphers, reversed and upside-down text, letters spread out with spaces;
  • text tucked inside JSON, XML or Markdown, where only a machine looks;
  • control tokens copied from a model’s own format, so that text pretends to be the system speaking.

It undoes them, repeatedly when one is wrapped in another, and keeps what the text really said.

Vid also reads the reply coming back from the model, and notes any secret on its way out: an API key, a token, a private key. It records only enough of it to recognise it, never the whole secret.

The rule. Vid watches and shows. The model always receives the original call; your agent works exactly as before. If you want the attack stopped, not only seen, that is Perun.

2. Install

Section titled “2. Install”

Download Vid from zeravatech.ca/downloads/protection. Each file is listed with its SHA-256 checksum; check it before you install.

Ubuntu / Debian.

sha256sum vid_*_amd64.deb          # compare with the checksum on the page
sudo apt install ./vid_*_amd64.deb
systemctl --user start vid         # or log out and in again

Vid runs as a background service for your own user, and starts with every login. It needs no administrator rights to run, and writes only under ~/.config/vid and ~/.local/share/vid. Install Vid or Perun on a computer, not both: Perun does everything Vid does, on the same port.

Windows. Run the installer; it needs no administrator rights. Leave “Start Vid automatically when I sign in” ticked: Vid then runs in the background with no window. The Start menu gets Vid status.

To check that it runs, open Vid status from the Start menu, or in a terminal type vid status (on Windows, the full path: "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Vid\vid.exe" status).

The first time, before any call has passed through, the counts are all zero. That is correct.

The pages of this document

Section titled “The pages of this document”