# HOL Guard enterprise networking

HOL Guard always validates TLS certificates. Managed policy may select the platform system proxy, an explicit HTTPS proxy, or direct networking. An administrator-approved PEM CA bundle is added to—not substituted for—the operating system trust store. Proxy URLs containing credentials are rejected; credentialed proxies must use the operating system's approved credential mechanism.

Public registry intelligence is optional and can be disabled with `network.allowPublicRegistries=false`. Local enforcement remains active during DNS, proxy, TLS, Guard Cloud, or registry outages. The machine-readable allowlist is [mdm-endpoints.v1.json](mdm-endpoints.v1.json).

For user-owned Guard updates, an organization may set `update.indexUrl` to an internal Python package index. This value is managed-policy authority: it must be an absolute HTTPS URL with no user information, password, query, fragment, or whitespace. Credentials must come from an approved proxy or operating-system credential mechanism and must never be embedded in the index URL. When `network.allowPublicRegistries=false`, `update.indexUrl` is required before a user-owned update can run. The updater uses the same explicit index for its initial installer attempt and any forced retry; project-local pip/uv configuration and ambient index variables are not trusted source configuration. Public status output reports only that an index is configured and its SHA-256 source fingerprint—it does not expose the raw URL.

Native Guard installers are self-contained and do not contact the runtime endpoints listed above. The Guard package updater contacts the configured `update.indexUrl`, or PyPI when public registries are allowed and no managed index is configured. Administrators should test endpoint trust from the same user or daemon context that runs Guard; user shell environment variables are not managed-policy authority.
