Infrastructure Security

What is infrastructure security in agentic systems?

Infrastructure security in agentic systems focuses on protecting the runtime environments, credentials, tools, and execution paths used by autonomous and semi-autonomous agents.

Unlike traditional applications, agents often execute dynamic code, access multiple systems, and operate continuously—making infrastructure-level controls critical.

This layer ensures agents cannot outlive their purpose, escape execution boundaries, or misuse credentials at scale.

What is Shadow AI and how is it detected?

Shadow AI refers to agents or AI-driven workflows operating outside approved identity, security, or governance controls. These may include unsanctioned tools, embedded agents in scripts, or external models accessing internal systems without oversight.

Detecting Shadow AI requires visibility into agent identities, runtime behavior, and access patterns—ensuring every agent action can be attributed to a known, governed identity.

What are zombie agents and why are they dangerous?

Zombie agents are orphaned or forgotten agents that continue to exist after their original purpose, task, or owner is gone.They often retain credentials, permissions, or access paths that are no longer monitored.

Zombie agents increase attack surface, enable silent misuse, and make it difficult to reason about who or what still has access to systems.

How does IAM help identify and contain zombie agents?

Identity systems help contain zombie agents by enforcing lifecycle-aware identity controls. Agents can be issued time-bound credentials, tied to specific tasks or environments, and automatically decommissioned when no longer needed.

This ensures agents cannot persist indefinitely without review or renewal.

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What is the difference between agent delegation and agent impersonation?

Agent delegation is an explicit, controlled grant of authority where an agent is allowed to perform specific actions on behalf of a user or system within defined scope and limits.

Agent impersonation is an unauthorized or misleading assumption of another identity, where an agent acts as if it were a user or another agent without proper permission. Delegation is intentional and auditable; impersonation is a security threat.

How do we model “agent consent” vs. “user consent”?

User consent represents a human’s permission for data use or actions tied to legal and regulatory obligations.

Agent consent represents a derived, scoped authorization that allows an agent to act within the boundaries set by user consent and policy. Agent consent must never exceed user consent and should always be traceable back to the originating user approval.

What is the “Agent Impersonation” threat?

Agent impersonation is a threat where an agent pretends to be another agent or a human user to gain unauthorized access or perform restricted actions.

This can occur through token misuse, identity confusion, or weak verification between agents. It breaks accountability and can lead to privilege escalation and data misuse.

What is “Memory Poisoning” in agentic systems?

Memory poisoning is an attack where malicious or incorrect information is inserted into an agent’s memory or long-term context. The agent later relies on this poisoned memory to make decisions, execute actions, or authorize access incorrectly.

This threat persists over time and is difficult to detect without validation, isolation, and memory governance controls.

What is sandboxing in agentic infrastructure?

Sandboxing isolates agent execution environments to prevent unsafe code, tool calls, or data access from affecting other systems. Each agent or task runs within defined boundaries that restrict filesystem access, network calls, and resource usage.

Sandboxing limits the blast radius if an agent behaves unexpectedly or is manipulated.

Why is sandboxing critical for code execution and tool use?

Agents often execute code, call APIs, or interact with external tools dynamically.

Without sandboxing, a compromised agent could access sensitive infrastructure, exfiltrate data, or modify systems beyond its intent.

Sandboxed execution ensures that even successful attacks are contained and observable.

How does credential theft occur in agentic systems?

Credential theft in agentic systems can occur through prompt injection, memory exposure, misconfigured secrets, or insecure runtime environments. Because agents may handle tokens or API keys programmatically, leaked credentials can be rapidly exploited at scale.

This makes traditional long-lived secrets especially risky in agent-driven environments.

How can infrastructure security reduce credential theft risk?

Infrastructure security reduces credential theft by enforcing short-lived, scoped, and environment-bound credentials.

Secrets can be rotated automatically, injected at runtime, or avoided entirely through secretless access patterns.

Binding credentials to agent identity, task, and environment limits reuse and replay. Learn more about agentic IAM security aspects.

Why must infrastructure controls complement identity controls?

Identity defines who an agent is and what it can do. Infrastructure security ensures that actions are executed safely, where and how they are executed. Without infrastructure safeguards, identity policies can be bypassed through runtime abuse or leaked credentials.

Together, identity and infrastructure controls form a complete defense for agentic systems.

How does infrastructure security support safe agent scaling?

As the number of agents grows, manual oversight becomes impossible. Infrastructure-level controls—such as sandboxing, lifecycle enforcement, and automated decommissioning—ensure safety scales with autonomy.

This allows organizations to adopt agentic systems without accumulating unmanaged risk.

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