Insecure Agents

Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel, joins us to discuss deepsec, Vercel's open-source AI security harness designed to scan entire codebases for vulnerabilities using coding agents like Claude and Codex. We explore why software engineering is shifting from programming models to programming agent harnesses, how deepsec scales security reviews across millions of lines of code, when AI token spend is justified, and why Vercel is betting on AI Gateways, microVM sandboxes, and self-driving infrastructure to power the next generation of software development.

Sunil Agrawal, CISO at Glean and one of the authors of the AWARE Framework, joins us to discuss the new guide for governing generative and agentic AI he co-authored with Palo Alto Networks and Databricks. This framework gives CISOs a much needed playbook in a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Palo Alto's Unit 42 showing AI-assisted attacks can now reach data exfiltration in as little as 25 minutes, leaving defenders almost no time to respond.We dig into AWARE's five behavioral dimensions, why governing modern AI means controlling intent and context rather than just access, how to give every agent a scoped identity instead of shared credentials, and the cascading risks that emerge when agents start delegating to other agents.

Alex Stamos, CPO of Corridor and past CISO at Facebook, and Andrew Becherer CISO at Socket, join us to discuss the open letter they and 100 others have signed in opposition to the US government taking down Fable after research from Amazon showed capabilities that gave the current administration pause.We discuss the potentially dangerous precent this sets, the state of the letter, and what to do while waiting for Fable to come back online.

Why does every AI security incident seem to trace back to auth? We sit down with Damian Schenkelman, VP of Research and Development at Auth0 to discuss⁠ recent incidents in the news, MCP, the act claim chain, and the future of agent identity.The conversation digs into the core problem agents create: when an agent hands a task to a sub-agent, which calls an MCP server, which hits a SaaS API, who is actually making this call, and on whose behalf?

In this episode we sit down with Dick Hardt, the creator of OAuth, to talk about why the auth primitives we built for the web fall apart the moment agents start acting on our behalf. We dive in to why OAuth doesn't fit MCP, what breaks when an agent runs for hours and touches a dozen systems using your credentials, and his new protocol, AAuth: a way for developers to run agents without API keys.

We sit down with Geoff Huntley, creator of the Ralph Wiggum Loop and founder of LatentPatterns.com, to hear his take on where AI is pushing software next: hyper-personalized software, software factories, and eventually product factories that optimize themselves for revenue. With this level of hyper-personalization that AI now allows for Geoff says he finds himself asking vendors "are you a utility company, or are you something I'm going to clone?" He walks us through what this means for moats, open source, and the future of how software gets built.

We sit down with top AI engineers such as Sherwood Callaway, founder of Sazabi, Anthony Shew, core maintainer of turborepo at Vercel, and Dexter Horthy, CEO of HumanLayer, to hear about how they are using sandboxes to make agents more performant. We also discuss the security differences amongst sandbox providers with Rene Brandel, founder of Casco. We discuss how sandboxes aren't created equal and how the underlying infrastructure that powers them directly impacts your security posture.

Mark Dorsi, CISO at Netlify, sits down with us at RSAC to talk about the shift to everyone becoming a builder and how he's coding 6 hours a day and how products, including Netlify, must adapt to a world where most users are agents.

Kyle Bhiro and Josh Kotrous from Pensar join us at RSAC to discuss how AI is reshaping the entire AppSec industry. Kyle and Josh elaborate on how agentic code scanning and continuous testing is leading to AppSec market consolidation and new expectations around AppSec spend.We also explore the thought that point in time audits may make less sense for AI, which changes constantly. Given this, continuous testing seems to be an emerging standard.

Ian Webster, CEO and Co-Founder of promptfoo, joins us at RSAC to discuss OpenAI's recent acquisition of promptfoo. Ian discusses how appealing to both developers and security teams was key to promptfoo's go-market-strategy strategy.Ian's success offers a playbook for other AI security companies that may be targeting an acquisition and shares what's next for promptfoo at OpenAI.

Alex Stamos, former CISO of Facebook and current Chief Product Officer at Corridor, explains how AI is reshaping the kill chain and enabling new capabilities for attackers worldwide.He also outlines what’s needed to defend against these emerging threats and how to prepare your organization for what’s coming.

Animesh is the CEO and founder of PlayerZero, a company using context graphs to build a complete picture of how your production software actually behaves.Animesh's X article on context graphs went viral getting over 2M views. Animesh explains what a context graph is, why you should build one, and how it can help you build a world model around why decisions get made.

The agent identity conversation is back on the Insecure Agents podcast.Developers are starting to feel the pain of missing agent identity infrastructure as they think through problems like agent memory access and storage and goal based authorization for tools and resources unplanned for at agent inception. Listen to Pavan and Aaron explain how their recent Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) launch can help.

James sits down to tell us about OpenClaw using Convex, how proper architectural building blocks sets you up for better security, and how the shift to agents writing all of software changes who platforms like Convex are building for.

You've heard of OpenClaw, but have you heard of Momo?Momo is built by Cailyn Yong and is a personal assistant agent for teams. Momo's memory actually works and makes it stand out against other agents such as OpenClaw. Hear from Cailyn on the AI security issues this type of agent faces, how she built Momo, and what it takes to be successful in this increasingly popular space.

In this episode we discuss the engineering and security challenges that separate POC agents from enterprise agents.Kwindla brings a wealth of knowledge on common hard agent engineering problems such as async, automatic, non-blocking context compaction, agent memory, and stateful long running agents.

Listen in to learn how Peter created the best personal assistant agent to date and the security concerns at play. Personal assistant agents need lots of access to do meaningful work but there are tradeoffs between innovation and security.

Supply chain security for open source dependencies, how to protect yourself against attacks like Shai Hulud 2.0, and how AI agents introduce new security challenges.

Agents need purpose-built sandboxes that spin up in milliseconds to execute tasks like code analysis, web browsing, and data processing. Ivan addresses the hurdles around speed, security, and statefulness.

An attacker can hide prompt injections in images that only become to AI systems, enabling data exfiltration on production systems like Google Gemini CLI. Is weaponized image scaling a security vulnerability, or an architectural flaw in how AI systems process multi-modal inputs?

We sat down to discuss the just released OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, exploring critical threats like goal hijacking, remote code execution, and identity management while breaking down how to balance AI agent autonomy with deterministic guardrails and user trust.

Browser agents need standardized ways to identify themselves and prove their legitimacy when accessing the web. We take a deeper look at credential management, scoped permissions models, telemetry for monitoring behavior, and implementing hard boundaries to prevent prompt injection and unauthorized actions for browser agents.

The highly anticipated MCP debate. We explore critical questions around SDK replacement, marketplace curation, enterprise concerns, authentication challenges, and whether MCP represents a security nightmare or the future of agent systems.

Bryan and Alex discuss how AI agent architecture directly impacts security posture. We take a look at everything from infrastructure-level guardrails rather than relying solely on tool-call layer protections to the cold start problem and defense-in-depth strategies against prompt injection.

Samuel Colvin founded Pydantic in 2017 and launched the company in 2023. He discusses MCP security vulnerabilities, AI agent authentication challenges, and the upcoming Pydantic AI Gateway for threat detection.

Mackenzie joins us to discuss AI in code security, smarter vulnerability prioritization, and Aikido's research into malicious packages in open source.

Steve Vandenburg, AI Security Architect at Cotiviti, discusses the evolving role of AI security in enterprise environments and how frameworks like NIST AI RMF, HITRUST, and the new SAIL framework translate from policy into real technical implementation.

Dor Sarig has spent nearly two decades in cybersecurity, from offensive work with the Israeli government to leading product roles at Simulate and Perimeter 81. Now CEO of Pillar Security, a unified platform to secure the entire AI lifecycle and is behind the SAIL framework.

This week we're taking a deep dive on the agent identity problem. Ian Livingstone, Matt Creager and Jared Hanson founded Keycard to accelerate agent adoption without sacrificing control.

John has written books on adversarial AI, guidelines for the UK government and laid out the globally adopted OWASP LLM Top 10. On this episode of Insecure Agents, he discuss the upcoming release of the OWASP Agentic Top 10.

Dune Security simulates AI-driven social engineering attacks—like phishing, smishing, and voice cloning—to identify and train at-risk employees before real breaches occur. On this episode, Kyle Ryan discusses how generative AI is supercharging phishing tactics, how Dune adapts training to individuals’ vulnerabilities, and why both humans and AI agents must be hardened against persuasion-based attacks.

Aengus Lynch is a doing a PhD in ML, is a contractor for Anthropic, and is working on something new. Following his viral research, he joins Insecure Agents to discuss the concerning potential for AI agents to engage in blackmail and manipulation tactics against humans.

After launching with $31 million in funding, Harry Wetherald, CEO of Maze, joins Insecure Agents to discuss why every security tool will be rewritten in the next 5 years.

Vineeth is a busy guy. He co-leads key initiatives at OWASP, including the Agent Name Service (ANS), the AI Vulnerability Scoring System (AI‑VSS) and the Agentic AI Top 10.

Kerem Proulx is Co-Founder of Pensar, the security layer for coding agents. In front of a live audience during New York Tech Week 2025, we discuss agent orchestration security concerns, identity security in a post AI agent world and AI agents becoming primary users of products.

Tamir shares thoughts on the recent addition of AI "Darth Vader" to Fortnite, how to jailbreak voice agents, and what can go wrong when AI security falls short.

A deep dive with Mark Dorsi, the CISO of Netlify. Live recorded during RSA Conference 2025.