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#agents#need#agent#access#security#layer#separate#operating#file#run
Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
You can make a file called "orders" and you can run your agent as a user with write access to that file, or as one that doesn't, and then you don't need scans or audits to tell you whether the agent can create orders or not, you can just take your operating system's word for it.
Is there anything all this bolt-on AI security stuff does that can't instead be handled by donning a sysadmin hat and managing your agents as separate users?
Further, servers still have hosting value, but any business running agents is almost certainly going to want a sandbox that limits what code runs for agentic work, so targeting _sandbox_ environments is probably the better bet long-term. And, yes, you could implement your proposal in any chroot jail or gvisor, but nobody wants to get their hands dirty finnicking with that - programmatic access control beats file-based access control for the simple reason it's managed for you.
If anything, my critique of OP's implementation is actually the opposite of yours: they've chosen the right primitive and layer, but people really need contextual access control rather than RBAC. Sort of like ongoing zero trust. If it was possible to inspect the context, decide if it was a bad idea to allow the tool call, without exposing the decider to untrusted context, you could have something that really changes things.
Linux cannot stop an agent from calling:
POST /wire-transfer amount=5,000,000
Sure it's work to build such things, but building restraints into the app feels more reliable than playing whack-a-mole with scanner results.
Operating systems can probably do better to meet this need (e.g. capability based ones like fuchsia) but even as is their rules just feel so much more binding.
Like everything else, the packaging and ergonomics matter. Do we need podman or docker when we could just don our sysadmin hats and manage namespaces and cgroups directly instead?
I've been working an open-source toolkit to stop AI agents from running amok.
You can scan your code (Python, JS, TS) and it will flag any risks and can offer fixes. It runs offline, but you can wire an LLM to do code analysis as well.
You can run it with:
npx @makerchecker/scan
Would love to get any feedback!