Formal is two proxies that share one control plane. Formal Endpoint sits where traffic starts (a laptop, a VM or an agent sandbox) and controls what goes out. Formal PAM sits in front of your private resources and controls who gets in and what they do there.
What does Formal Endpoint do?
Formal Endpoint is an egress proxy for the machines your engineers and AI agents run on. It intercepts TCP and UDP flows, terminates TLS, applies your policies and logs each request. Transparent interception runs on macOS and Linux, and as a sidecar on Kubernetes and Amazon ECS, so client applications don’t change. On Windows, it connects you to resources through local listeners; Transparent Mode isn’t available there yet.
What does Formal PAM do?
Formal PAM is privileged access management built on the Connector, a protocol-aware reverse proxy you deploy as a container in your own infrastructure. Engineers and agents reach Postgres, Snowflake, SSH hosts and Kubernetes with their own identity. The Connector authenticates upstream with a native user, so they never hold the resource credentials. It evaluates policies on requests and responses, masks data inline and records every session.
Do you need both?
No. Each product runs on its own: the smallest deployment is a single Connector in your VPC, and an Endpoint sidecar sends Pod traffic straight to the internet without one. Start where the risk is: if it’s outbound agent traffic, that’s Endpoint; if it’s standing access to production data, that’s PAM. Run both and the Endpoint can route the traffic it intercepts through a Connector.
How are they managed?
Both products report to one control plane: the same policies (written in Rego), identities and audit logs, with Catalog for resource discovery and Workflows for access approvals. The Control Plane never touches your data; only the Connector and the Endpoint do. The architecture guide shows where each piece runs.
“With Formal, we can finally manage least privilege access across our entire infrastructure through a single control plane.”
— Tom Daniels, CISO @ Cursor
Cursor replaced its homegrown access proxies with Formal Connector. Read the Cursor case study.