Rmontalbano/defenseclaw_win：DefenseClaw 的 Windows 原生桌面伴侣

A native Windows desktop companion for cisco-ai-defense/defenseclaw, replicating the defenseclaw tui terminal dashboard with WPF (.NET 9, Fluent theme) — the Windows counterpart to defenseclaw_mac.

Status: in active development. Built and live-verified against DefenseClaw 0.8.10 on Windows 11.

A community project, not an official Cisco product.

What it is

A read-mostly companion for a local DefenseClaw installation: a system-tray shield with live gateway/alert state, and a dashboard with panels across four groups — Monitor (Overview, Alerts, Logs, Audit, Activity), Govern (Skills, MCPs, Plugins, Tools), Discover (Inventory, AI Discovery, Registries, and - on a DefenseClaw runtime that has the AI Discovery runtime planes - Runtime), and Configure (Setup wizards, guardrail controls, config editor) — plus Settings and a command palette (Ctrl+K).

Design principle

All state changes go through the defenseclaw CLI. The app never writes DefenseClaw state directly; every mutation is executed as a logged CLI invocation whose exact argv, live output, and exit status appear in the Activity panel. Secrets never go on argv: they reach the CLI through its own console prompt, stdin, or, for commands with an environment-variable fallback (Splunk and observability tokens), that one child process's environment.

Data sources

Source	Location	Method
Gateway REST API	`http://127.0.0.1:<gateway.api_port>` (default 18970)	Unauthenticated GET endpoints (`/health`, `/status`, `/alerts`, …)
Audit database	`%USERPROFILE%\.defenseclaw\audit.db`	Read-only SQLite (WAL)
Inventory	`%USERPROFILE%\.defenseclaw\inventory.db`	Read-only SQLite (WAL)
Logs	`%USERPROFILE%\.defenseclaw\gateway.log`	Incremental tail via file watcher
Configuration	`config.yaml` + `.env`	Watched; token resolution follows the CLI's priority ladder
CLI	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\DefenseClaw\bin\defenseclaw.exe`	Subprocess for all state changes

Windows-specific features

WSL coexistence detection — warns when port 18970 is actually a WSL-side gateway relayed by wslrelay.exe
Connector certification badges — surfaces not_certified platform status before setup, not after failure
Managed installations are read-only — the app works out which DefenseClaw it drives (DEFENSECLAW_CONFIG, the developer runtime selector, DEFENSECLAW_HOME, the Windows managed layout under Program Files and ProgramData, then your profile). When that installation is administrator managed (deployment_mode: managed_enterprise, or the managed layout) or the selection cannot be trusted, the app only reads it: every control that changes something is disabled with the reason, the Overview says State-changing actions disabled, Settings → Connection → Installation shows what was selected and why, and the command runner refuses any command that is not a read, whatever asked for it (the config editor, which writes config.yaml itself, asks the same guard). Previews (--dry-run) and reads still run. See docs/PARITY-FOUNDATIONS.md section 10
Fail-mode visibility — warns when observe mode is paired with fail-closed hooks
Update awareness — checks GitHub releases; when you download an upgrade it compares the file's SHA-256 with the checksums.txt of the same release and, if cosign is installed, also verifies that file's sigstore signature against the upstream release workflow's identity (a signature cosign rejects stops the upgrade). Without cosign the signature is reported as published but not verified, and the SHA-256 comparison only shows the download matches that file. The installer itself is not Authenticode-signed, and the Updates window says so

The in-app upgrade flow supports two channels: the release's Setup installer (recommended on Setup-based installs) and the defenseclaw-upgrade.ps1 resolver script. The script is known broken on Setup-based installs upstream — it assumes a .defenseclaw\.venv POSIX-style layout and fails with "Managed Python not found"; it is byte-identical between 0.8.9 and 0.8.10, so this is not fixed by upgrading.

Installing

Download DefenseClaw.App.exe and checksums.txt from Releases, then check the hash before running it:

Get-FileHash .\DefenseClaw.App.exe -Algorithm SHA256

The value must match the line for DefenseClaw.App.exe in checksums.txt. Each release also carries a GitHub build-provenance attestation (gh attestation verify DefenseClaw.App.exe --repo Rmontalbano/defenseclaw_win). The exe is not Authenticode-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run.

Building

dotnet build DefenseClaw.Win.sln
dotnet test

Requires .NET 9 SDK on Windows. Releases publish as a self-contained single exe with SHA-256 checksums.

Security

Please report vulnerabilities privately; see SECURITY.md. Issues in DefenseClaw itself belong to cisco-ai-defense/defenseclaw.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE. Portions are adapted from defenseclaw_mac (Apache-2.0).