I have this nagging feeling with these kinds of agentic cloud products (and there seem to be so many these days): the promise is secure (as in isolated) workflows, but it’s unclear what that means when so many of the workflows themselves are privileged.
Or in other words: I often struggle to see the security value of a VM that I’m just going to load all of my sensitive credentials into anyways (since the agent needs them). The usability argument seems strong, but the security argument seems to hinge on me treating my local machine as a sort of bastion host, which I don’t think is generally true.
(This isn’t to denigrate the work itself: it seems very good. But it also seems like we’re still groping around a very weak definition of “security” for agentic workflows.)
I think traditional sandboxes are not going to be the correct abstraction. I’ve been messing around with building harnesses based on object capabilities and being able to limit exactly what an agent can access in what manner will be the way forward
With sandboxes you give your agent just what it needs and nothing more, not the whole suite of secrets living in your environment that could be exfiltrated
I have this nagging feeling with these kinds of agentic cloud products (and there seem to be so many these days): the promise is secure (as in isolated) workflows, but it’s unclear what that means when so many of the workflows themselves are privileged.
Or in other words: I often struggle to see the security value of a VM that I’m just going to load all of my sensitive credentials into anyways (since the agent needs them). The usability argument seems strong, but the security argument seems to hinge on me treating my local machine as a sort of bastion host, which I don’t think is generally true.
(This isn’t to denigrate the work itself: it seems very good. But it also seems like we’re still groping around a very weak definition of “security” for agentic workflows.)
I think traditional sandboxes are not going to be the correct abstraction. I’ve been messing around with building harnesses based on object capabilities and being able to limit exactly what an agent can access in what manner will be the way forward
With sandboxes you give your agent just what it needs and nothing more, not the whole suite of secrets living in your environment that could be exfiltrated