How to Handle Compromised AI Agents
ani_0523 · reddit · 2026-07-13
The author asks: What is the proper protocol when an agent is found to have its prompt externally tampered with during execution?
They argue that two common approaches are flawed:
- Rotating keys is time-consuming and inadvertently terminates all agents sharing that key.
- Killing the process outright results in lost state and leaves no trace of what the agent has already done.
Their proposed solution decouples identity from credentials:
- Every agent possesses a registered identity.
- Permissions are granted via signed, expirable, and revocable grants.
- Before executing any meaningful action, an agent must request authorization ("May I?"). If using MCP, this is enforced by a proxy in the path and cannot be bypassed.
- Revocation takes effect on the very next action.
- An audit trail is natively generated and secured against post-hoc tampering via a hash chain.
The author emphasizes that retroactive logging cannot accurately answer critical questions like "which specific agent, running which version, took what action, and under whose authorization?"
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