Working paper
Inside the folder
Author
Authored working paper · 2026
Agent securityFault propagationBlast radiusRisk containment
Description
A systems framework for understanding how a local reasoning, tool, or authorization fault can travel through an agent's action loop, and where containment should stop it.
Working paper; proposed evaluation protocol
The research question
How far can a local fault travel through an agentic system before the system detects and contains it?
My contribution
- Defined Agentic Fault Propagation across perception, reasoning, planning, tool selection, authorization, execution, observation, and replanning
- Introduced Agentic Blast Radius to describe the consequential impact possible before containment or human intervention
- Developed a fault taxonomy, layered containment architecture, and an empirical evaluation protocol
Outcomes & evidence
- A four-part framework: fault lifecycle, propagation graph, blast-radius model, and layered containment
- Proposed controls spanning least-privilege authorization, deterministic policy enforcement, validation, approval, monitoring, logging, and recovery
- An evaluation protocol for agent benchmarks and controlled tool environments, rather than claimed experimental results
Approach & methods
- Modeled the agent action loop as a sequence of stages where a fault can be transmitted or amplified.
- Built on tool-using language models, agent evaluation, prompt injection, least privilege, and AI risk-management work to organize a fault taxonomy.
- Proposed containment through stage-level checks, trust boundaries around external content, independent approval for high-impact actions, and provenance-aware runtime monitoring.
- Specified how an empirical evaluation could use agent benchmarks and controlled tool environments to test fault propagation and containment.
Scope & limitations
- The paper explicitly does not claim experimental results.
- The proposed containment controls and evaluation protocol should not be read as demonstrated production protection or measured benchmark performance.