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Quickstart (5 min)

Option A — MiniShell (fastest, no account needed)

Run the one-liner installer. No account, no credit card, no dependencies. You get $2 of credit immediately — enough for hundreds of Haiku calls. ECDSA-P256 signed receipt on every call. Sign up later and we keep whatever balance is left for you.

macOS / Linux:

Terminal window
curl -fsSL https://cloakapi.io/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell 5.1+):

Terminal window
irm https://cloakapi.io/install.ps1 | iex

Verify the sha256 before running. Every sidecar is in sha256sum checkfile format, so on macOS / Linux run curl -fsSLO https://cloakapi.io/install.sh && curl -fsSLO https://cloakapi.io/install.sh.sha256 && sha256sum -c install.sh.sha256 and expect the line install.sh: OK. On Windows run Get-FileHash .\install.ps1 -Algorithm SHA256 and compare the printed hash with the one in the sidecar. Sidecars: install.sh.sha256 · install.ps1.sha256 · install.exe.sha256

Once installed:

Terminal window
cloakapi chat "What is CloakAPI?"

The response prints a Receipt JTI. Verify it:

Terminal window
curl -X POST https://api.cloakapi.io/api/v1/receipts/verify \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jti":"<jti from output above>"}'

Option B — Use your existing OpenAI SDK

Sign up at app.cloakapi.io and create a key under Integration → API keys. If you still had anonymous balance left when you signed up, it migrates to your account automatically.

No browser? (CI / headless / containers) Get a free-tier key with one curl — no GUI, no portal:

Terminal window
curl -sS -X POST https://api.cloakapi.io/api/v1/self-service/key \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{}'
# → {"api_key":"cloak_…","tier":"free", …}
export CLOAKAPI_API_KEY=cloak_…

On-device tokenisation (SDK + MCP) works immediately with this key; LLM relay is balance-gated (verify email for a $2 trial). Full details, guard rails, and the email-attached variant: Authentication → Get an API key (headless / no browser).

Use any standard OpenAI or Anthropic client — only base_url changes:

Terminal window
pip install openai
# or
npm install openai

2. Point it at the gateway

from openai import OpenAI


client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.cloakapi.io/api/v1",
    api_key="cloak_…",
)


resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise the attached email"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Server-side only. SDK calls use bearer-token auth, which browsers won’t expose cross-origin from docs.cloakapi.io or arbitrary pages. If you need browser-side calls, run them from https://app.cloakapi.io (which is on the CORS credentialed allowlist) or proxy through your own backend. Direct fetches from the docs page itself are blocked by our CSP — paste the snippet into your own dev environment.

3. Verify the receipt

Every response includes an X-CloakAPI-Receipt-V2 response header containing a base64url-encoded JSON OpenReceipt envelope. To verify it without an account, pass the header value verbatim:

Terminal window
# $RECEIPT = the entire X-CloakAPI-Receipt-V2 header value
curl -X POST https://api.cloakapi.io/api/v1/receipts/verify \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d "{\"receipt\": \"$RECEIPT\"}"

The gateway accepts three payload shapes:

  1. Header value (base64url string) — {"receipt": "<header>"} (recommended; least typing)
  2. Decoded envelope object — {"receipt": {"v":2,"alg":"ES256",...}}
  3. JTI lookup — {"jti": "<jti>"} (requires authentication)

Or paste the envelope into the browser-based verifier at app.cloakapi.io/receipt-verifier.

A valid: true response means:

  • the schema is intact,
  • the signature was made by a key listed in the public JWKS (https://api.cloakapi.io/api/.well-known/cloakapi-receipt-pubkeys.jwks),
  • the chain prev_hash links into the previous receipt for the same tenant.

Offline verification (no gateway round-trip)

The envelope is independently verifiable. Decode the base64url header, canonicalise the JSON (sort keys, no whitespace), drop the signature field, SHA-256 it, then ECDSA-P256 verify with the public key whose kid matches envelope.kid in the JWKS. Both openai-python and openai-js SDKs return the receipt header directly via response.headers["x-cloakapi-receipt-v2"].

A reference Python verifier in 30 lines (uses cryptography):

import base64, json, hashlib, urllib.request
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.asymmetric import ec
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.asymmetric.utils import encode_dss_signature
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives import hashes


def b64u(s): return base64.urlsafe_b64decode(s + "=" * (-len(s) % 4))


env = json.loads(b64u(receipt_header_value))
jwks = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(
    "https://api.cloakapi.io/api/.well-known/cloakapi-receipt-pubkeys.jwks").read())
key = next(k for k in jwks["keys"] if k["kid"] == env["kid"])


sig = b64u(env.pop("signature"))
canonical = json.dumps(env, sort_keys=True, separators=(",", ":")).encode()


pub = ec.EllipticCurvePublicNumbers(
    int.from_bytes(b64u(key["x"]), "big"),
    int.from_bytes(b64u(key["y"]), "big"),
    ec.SECP256R1(),
).public_key()


pub.verify(
    encode_dss_signature(int.from_bytes(sig[:32], "big"), int.from_bytes(sig[32:], "big")),
    canonical,
    ec.ECDSA(hashes.SHA256()),
)
print("PASS")

That’s it — you’re now sending traffic through a gateway that produces audit-grade evidence on every call.

Where does tokenisation happen on this path? Nowhere — with a bare SDK pointed at api.cloakapi.io, the gateway is a blind relay: it forwards your request exactly as your client sent it and never inspects, detects, or tokenises content on our servers. To have your PII tokenised, it must happen on your own machine — use Option C below (local proxy), or one of the other client-side ways (browser chat, desktop app, browser extension).

Option C — client-side drop-in (local proxy)

Run the CloakAPI local proxy on your own machine and point any OpenAI/Anthropic client at it. The proxy tokenises on your machine, then forwards only tokens through the CloakAPI gateway to your provider — detected identifiers are replaced before anything is sent (cloaked ≠ anonymous — bounded by published recall), and the gateway stays a blind relay (it sees only tokens) while it meters the call, signs the receipt, and bills the markup. Your provider, model and BYOK key choice are configured in your CloakAPI account — the proxy itself accepts no provider URL (it is gateway-locked by design, so every call gets a signed receipt).

from openai import OpenAI


client = OpenAI(
    base_url="http://localhost:8799/v1",
    api_key="unused",  # the proxy holds your CloakAPI key; provider keys live in your account
)


resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise the email from Alice."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Configure the proxy with your CloakAPI keys by path (never on the command line):

Terminal window
CLOAK_API_KEY_FILE=/path/to/your/cloakapi-key        # your CloakAPI tenant API key
CLOAK_TENANT_HMAC_KEY_FILE=/path/to/your/trust-key   # per-tenant pre-tokenised trust key
# upstream is always the CloakAPI gateway (https://api.cloakapi.io/api/v1) —
# there is no provider-URL setting; BYOK provider keys live in your account.
# default listen address: 127.0.0.1:8799  (chosen to dodge RStudio/Jupyter/Dask)
# port taken? set CLOAK_PROXY_LISTEN=127.0.0.1:<free-port> and use the SAME
# port in your base_url above — the proxy never silently rebinds.

What’s covered. Structured PII — emails, phones, cards, national IDs, IBANs, IP addresses (~10 types) — is tokenised deterministically with no model, always on. Free-form personal names are protected by an optional on-device mini-AI (Ollama + Phi by default); with it running, names are tokenised on your machine, and by default, if it is unreachable the proxy fails closed rather than let a name leak.

Limits (honest).

  • Streaming is not yet supported — "stream": true returns HTTP 501 (planned for Phase 2).
  • The proxy is stateless per request — it only detokenises tokens whose originals were in that same request (fine for normal chat, which re-sends history). /v1/models and /healthz are available.

Round-trip a file

You’re not limited to text in, text out. Attach a document to any call (see File attachments) and the model’s response can be rebuilt into a real file — .docx, .xlsx, .html, and other formats — client-side, on the device that holds the alias map (the gateway never sees the plaintext or the file). Format list, fidelity matrix, and the receipt claim: File rebuild (round-trip).

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