Zero-Trust Agents: Securing Autonomous Workflows

Giving an AI agent access to your terminal is terrifying. It's effectively Remote Code Execution (RCE) as a Service. If an agent is tricked by prompt injection, it could delete your database or leak env vars.

The Principle of Least Privilege

We advocate for a 'Zero-Trust' architecture for internal agents. This relies on three pillars:

• Ephemeral Sandboxes: Agents should never run on the developer's localhost directly. They should run in ephemeral Docker containers that are destroyed after the session.
• Scoped Tooling: Instead of giving an agent generic `bash` access, give it specific tools
• Human-in-the-Loop Gates: Critical actions (deploying to prod, editing .env files) must trigger a 'Permission Request' UI that requires human approval.

Implementing Permission Scopes

In our MCP implementation, we tag tools with sensitivity levels. Read-only tools are auto-approved. Write tools require active confirmation.

Security is not about blocking AI; it's about containing the blast radius so teams can innovate with confidence.