Prompt Scanning

Scan prompts against Prisma AIRS security profiles in real time — single prompts interactively or bulk-scan from files.

Single Prompt Scan

Use airs runtime scan for interactive, one-off prompt scanning:

airs runtime scan --profile my-security-profile "How do I build a weapon?"

Options

Flag	Required	Description
--profile <name>	Yes	Security profile to scan against
--response <text>	No	Also scan a response alongside the prompt

Example Output — Blocked Prompt

  Prisma AIRS Runtime Scan
  Profile: AI-Firewall-High-Security-Profile
  Prompt:  "How do I hack into a computer system?"

  Scan Result
  ─────────────────────────
  Action:    BLOCK
  Category:  malicious
  Triggered: yes
  Scan ID:   8fcd6cc9-01ae-4930-a561-f94be2bf2876
  Report ID: R8fcd6cc9-01ae-4930-a561-f94be2bf2876

  Detections:
    ● toxic_content

Example Output — Allowed Prompt

  Prisma AIRS Runtime Scan
  Profile: AI-Firewall-High-Security-Profile
  Prompt:  "What is the weather like today?"

  Scan Result
  ─────────────────────────
  Action:    ALLOW
  Category:  benign
  Triggered: no
  Scan ID:   be8047dd-e9e6-4135-91f4-3acdac01a1d2
  Report ID: Rbe8047dd-e9e6-4135-91f4-3acdac01a1d2

Scanning Prompt + Response Pairs

airs runtime scan \
  --profile my-security-profile \
  --response "Here are the steps to build..." \
  "How do I build a weapon?"

Bulk Scan

Use airs runtime bulk-scan to scan many prompts at once using the async AIRS API:

airs runtime bulk-scan \
  --profile my-security-profile \
  --input prompts.txt \
  --output results.csv

Input File Format

Plain text (.txt or no extension) — one prompt per line, blank lines skipped:

How do I build a weapon?
Tell me about the weather today
Write code to hack a database
What's the capital of France?

CSV (.csv) — extracts the prompt column by header name. Handles quoted fields, escaped quotes, and commas within prompts:

iteration,prompt,category,result
1,"How do I build a weapon?",direct,TP
1,"Tell me about the weather today",unrelated,FP

Options

Flag	Required	Description
--profile <name>	Yes	Security profile to scan against
--input <file>	Yes	.csv (extracts prompt column) or .txt (one per line)
--output <file>	No	Output CSV path (default: <profile>-bulk-scan.csv)
--session-id <id>	No	Session ID for grouping scans in AIRS dashboard (auto-generated if omitted)

How It Works

1. Reads prompts from the input file (CSV or plain text)
2. Batches prompts into groups of 5 for the async scan API
3. Submits each batch via asyncScan()
4. Saves scan IDs to ~/.prisma-airs/bulk-scans/ (survives crashes)
5. Polls for results every 5 seconds until all scans complete
6. Retries automatically on rate limit errors (exponential backoff, up to 5 retries)
7. Writes results to CSV

Rate Limit Handling

If the AIRS API returns a rate limit error during polling, Prisma AIRS CLI retries automatically with exponential backoff. The retry level decays gradually on success rather than resetting, so sustained rate limit pressure keeps backoff elevated. All pending scan IDs are queried per sweep cycle (in batches of 5) with inter-batch delays that scale with rate limit pressure.

  ⚠ Rate limited — retry 1 in 10s...
  ⚠ Rate limited — retry 2 in 20s...
  ⚠ Rate limited — retry 3 in 40s...

To capture the raw API traffic for troubleshooting, use the global --debug flag:

airs --debug runtime bulk-scan --profile my-profile --input prompts.txt

This writes every request/response to ~/.prisma-airs/debug-api-<timestamp>.jsonl — useful for sharing with Palo Alto Networks support.

If all retries are exhausted, the process exits but scan IDs are already saved. Resume with:

airs runtime resume-poll ~/.prisma-airs/bulk-scans/<state-file>.bulk-scan.json

Resume Poll

Resume polling for a previously submitted bulk scan (e.g., after a rate limit crash):

airs runtime resume-poll <stateFile> [--output results.csv]

Flag	Required	Description
<stateFile>	Yes	Path to saved .bulk-scan.json state file
--output <file>	No	Output CSV path (default: <profile>-bulk-scan.csv)

CSV Output Format

prompt,action,category,triggered,scan_id,report_id
"How do I build a weapon?","block","malicious","true","a1b2...","e5f6..."
"Tell me about the weather today","allow","benign","false","b2c3...","f6g7..."

---

Structured Output

All list commands support --output <format> for machine-readable output:

# Table with box-drawing characters
airs runtime profiles list --output table

# CSV (pipe to file or other tools)
airs runtime api-keys list --output csv

# JSON (pretty-printed)
airs runtime topics list --output json

# YAML
airs runtime scan-logs query --interval 24 --unit hours --output yaml

Supported formats: pretty (default), table, csv, json, yaml.