Heddle: Trust Enforcement and Audit Logging for Claude Desktop MCP Connections

What Heddle Solves

Heddle addresses a security gap in Claude Desktop's MCP (Model Context Protocol) implementation. While MCP defines how Claude communicates with tool servers, it lacks built-in authentication, audit trails, and access controls like read-only vs. write permissions.

Core Architecture

The tool implements a trust tier system defined in YAML configurations:

• Tier 1 (T1): Read-only configurations that physically cannot make POST requests, even if the backend API would accept them.
• Tier 2 (T2): Allows scoped writes with defined boundaries.
• Tier 3 (T3): Permits cross-service invocation between connected tools.

Every tool call passes through a six-stage pipeline: rate limiting → access mode check → escalation rules → input validation → trust enforcement → HTTP bridge.

Security Features

The security architecture includes:

• Trust tier enforcement based on YAML configurations
• Credential broker for managing service authentication
• Escalation rules for controlled privilege elevation
• Hash-chained audit log for tamper-evident tracking

Development Collaboration

Claude assisted in building several components:

• Initial configuration schema design
• Test suite structure implementation
• Development of starter packs through conversational iteration
• Collaborative design and implementation of the security architecture

Available Starter Packs

Heddle ships with six ready-to-use configurations:

• Prometheus monitoring
• Grafana dashboards
• Ollama local LLM management
• Sonarr media management
• Radarr media management
• Gitea self-hosted Git service

These starter packs can be dropped into Claude Desktop and run immediately without additional configuration.

Technical Details

The tool connects Claude Desktop to multiple services through a single MCP connection. The original implementation mentioned connecting to 9 services: Prometheus, Grafana, Ollama, Gitea, Sonarr, Radarr, RSS feeds, a RAG API, and a GPU VRAM manager.

Heddle is free and open source under the MIT license, available at https://github.com/goweft/heddle.