Confused deputy (AI agents)

A program with broad permissions is tricked into using them for someone who should not have them; agents with shared service accounts are a common case.

An internal assistant runs with a service account that can read every document. A junior employee asks it for the salary spreadsheet, and the agent fetches it, because the agent is allowed to, even though the employee is not. The fix is to act with the permissions of the person asking: pass their identity through (OAuth on their behalf) and check access per user, not per agent.

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Related terms

Excessive agency: An AI agent with more tools, permissions or autonomy than its task needs, so a mistake or an injected instruction can do real damage.
Non-human identity (agent identity): Accounts, keys and tokens used by software rather than people: service accounts, API keys, CI tokens and, more and more, AI agents.
OAuth: A standard that lets an app act on a user’s account elsewhere (mail, calendar, files) without ever seeing the password.

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