When agents need guardrails: practical security insights for product counsel
Box's CTO breaks down agentic security into practical categories that help legal teams think through access controls, action authorization, and manipulation detection for autonomous systems.
In a discussion featuring Box CTO Ben Kus and Senior Product Marketing Manager Meena Ganesh from the "Agentic Security Unlocked" episode, important perspectives are provided for product counsel on agent deployment strategies. They present a three-category framework—data security, unintended actions, and attacker manipulation—to guide the development of governance for autonomous systems.
The segment on data security highlights the differences between agents and traditional applications, noting that agents handle natural language queries and may retrieve sensitive information without conventional access controls. Maintaining information boundaries is crucial.
The principle of "least privilege" is emphasized, allowing teams to limit an agent’s data access and permissions to what is essential, simplifying governance.
Regarding unintended actions, agents may make context-driven decisions rather than follow fixed scripts, necessitating governance frameworks that accommodate their behaviors.
In discussing manipulation, the conversation connects to established security concepts like prompt injection and data poisoning, suggesting that existing frameworks for insider threats can adapt to agent environments.
Lastly, a "human-in-the-loop" approach for critical actions ensures accountability, combining autonomous agent functionality for routine tasks with necessary human oversight for significant decisions.
This discussion provides product counsel with a structured approach to agent security, enabling teams to implement safeguards while exploring new capabilities responsibly.
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