What is the confused deputy problem in agent systems, and how does it relate to agent-to-agent authentication?
A confused deputy occurs when an agent uses its elevated permissions to perform an action on behalf of a less-privileged caller that the caller could not do directly, leading to privilege escalation. The root cause is that a trusted agent acts on natural-language requests, including from other agents, without verifying the originator's authority, so robust systems propagate identity and scope on every hop and enforce access control on agent-to-agent calls.
How to think about it
A confused deputy occurs when an agent uses its elevated permissions to perform an action on behalf of a less-privileged caller that the caller could not do directly, leading to privilege escalation. The root cause is that a trusted agent acts on natural-language requests, including from other agents, without verifying the originator’s authority, so robust systems propagate identity and scope on every hop and enforce access control on agent-to-agent calls.