Google HEIR and Cloudflare's AI security controls

The briefing

• Google HEIR: Google showcased HEIR, an open-source compiler toolchain for homomorphic encryption. It is designed to help pretrained AI models operate on encrypted inputs, so a server can compute without seeing the underlying data. Google demonstrated recommendation, fraud-detection, network-anomaly, and hotword workloads. The opportunity is private inference in cloud services; the caveat is real overhead. Google's latency figures are single-threaded CPU results, and accelerator work is still ahead. 1
• Cloudflare Access for Workers: Cloudflare launched a way to attach an Access policy directly to a Worker. That protection follows the Worker across routes, custom domains, workers.dev, and preview deployments. Policies can be applied at the account or application level, while authenticated identity details are available in code. It targets internal tools that are often deployed before login and authorization are designed. 2
• Cloudflare MCP traffic controls: Cloudflare Gateway now describes MCP requests using protocol-level heuristics, helping security teams find shadow MCP traffic, allow Portal-only access for approved servers, and block direct connections on managed network paths. This is a governance and network control, not an MCP SDK. It helps organizations inventory and constrain the systems agents can reach. 3

Why it matters