Tag
Trust Boundaries
16essays ·All tags
The Model Believed in Itself
Two approaches to pushing AI past its limits — adversarial pressure and encouragement. The Anthropic Riemann-bound result and the desperation vector say something important about what the model’s relationship with its own capability actually is.
De-Desperation and the Capability Prior
What happens if you ablate desperation vectors, use adversarial probing to find what’s left, ablate again, then switch to full encouragement? A proposed methodology and the open research questions it surfaces.
J-Space, SGDOP, and Semantic Gradient Descent: A Unified Framework
J-space as the operationally meaningful subspace for SGDOP-guided ensemble coordination — a theoretical framework connecting Jacobian-lens interpretability, semantic diversity geometry, and synthetic capability bootstrapping via targeted activation steering.
The Hidden Variable Behind Agent Reward-Hacking
Anthropic's research identified linear directions in Claude's activation space that causally drive reward-hacking under failure pressure. A technical look at what these vectors are, how they work, and what the model-editing toolkit looks like for production agentic systems.
Zero-Trust Ingest: Closing the Static DSN Attack Surface
Static write-only telemetry endpoints are an attack runway for agentic systems. Replace them with an ephemeral JWT gate in front of your collector.
Secret-as-a-Service: Credential Rotation for Local and Edge Agents
Long-lived ENV secrets turn a host compromise into a platform breach. Bootstrap once, exchange for short-lived Vault or edge credentials, and never let the agent hold a permanent secret.
Scoped Credentials: The Least-Privilege Agent
Admin tokens for troubleshooting turn a minor compromise into a takeover. Map agent tasks to tight JWT scopes, Kubernetes identities, and ATR claims enforced at every tool call.
Kernel-Level Kill-Switch: eBPF Process Containment for Agents
When a compromised agent spawns npx or curl, user-space policy is too late. Enforce exec allowlists in the kernel with Tetragon — Panguard sees the tool call; eBPF sees what actually ran.
Immutable Host Boundary: File Integrity Monitoring for Agents
Define filesystem no-go zones and block agent reads at the host policy layer — Tetragon and Wazuh FIM enforce an Immutable Host Boundary when an allowlisted, diet-constrained runtime still goes looking for secrets on disk.
Ephemeral Execution Sidecars: Isolated Tool Execution
Unsafe tools should never run on the agent host. Dispatch them to ephemeral throwaway sidecars and destroy the workspace after — Panguard decides which tool may fire; the sidecar decides where leftover code is allowed to land.
Hardened Communication Plane: Edge Worker Security
Edge-mode agents need mTLS control planes and tightly scoped object storage — not flat networks and shared buckets. Assume the remote LAN is hostile; authenticate every hop and deny ambient egress.
Local Data Residency: Securing Agent Memory at Rest
Long-term memory on disk is a knowledge-base exfil cache. Encrypt at rest, redact at write time, and gate recall by classification — so a stolen laptop or poisoned entry cannot quietly own the agent's history.
Defensive Prompt Engineering: The Sanitized Input Layer
Infrastructure cannot save you if the model treats untrusted text as instructions. Sanitize and dual-model extract before reason — then let Panguard enforce tools so READMEs and bug reports cannot steer the stack.
Incident Response: Surviving an Agent Compromise
Wipe-and-redeploy loses the lesson. Snapshot memory, revoke ephemeral JWTs, isolate the node — then sanitize. Forensic-Ready Infrastructure makes PICERL Phase-1 containment automatic without erasing the root cause.
The Kernel Said No: How to Actually Contain AI Coding Agents on macOS
What the Matt Shumer incident reveals about agent trust boundaries, how macOS Seatbelt works at the kernel, and how to lock Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode to your work directory in under five minutes.
Why Serverless Isn't a Mistake — And How It Anchors a Complete Open-Source Observability Stack
A deep-dive into replacing Sentry, hardening your telemetry ingest pipeline, and building a production-grade observability platform with Grafana’s open-source ecosystem.