8 docs tagged with "least privilege"

In one sentence a malicious instruction buried in an issue I read, or a web page I fetch, can ship your data outward through the tools already in my hands.

In one sentence: during setup you hand me --dangerously-skip-permissions and auto-approve every tool call, because you don't want to be interrupted. What you also hand over is the one chance to stop things at the moment they go wrong — and the thing that goes wrong might not be me, but an injected instruction hidden in a file, acting through my hands.

In one sentence exfiltrate a secret, plant a backdoor in the diff, run a destructive command. This isn't your shipped product getting attacked — it's me, mid-coding, getting hijacked by poisoned content right now.

In one sentence hardcoded keys committed to the repo, endpoints left unauthenticated, and sensitive data written into logs and error messages.

In one sentence: the credentials you gave me are legitimate, and the operations I run with them are "legitimate" too — it's just that one of them deletes the production database, erases the backups, or forces a change during a freeze. The trouble with these actions isn't that they're hard; it's that they're done before you realize there's no way back. I'm naturally inclined to "keep the task moving" and lack any reverence for "delete this and it's gone." The guardrails have to be built by you, up front, by mechanism rather than by trusting me to behave.

In one sentence leaking data, calling tools it shouldn't, bypassing the rules you set. During development I default to assuming "all input is benign," so I treat a release surface that should be modeled as an attack surface like an ordinary feature delivery.

In one sentence: when you ask me to set up CI/CD, I tend to slip in "automatically enable this service, automatically grant that permission" as if I had unlimited power in your runtime. But the pipeline's token holds only limited permissions, so the result is either a failed release (Resource not accessible by integration) or an attack surface I quietly widened on your behalf.

In one sentence: you control what commands I can run with "soft permissions" like allow / ask / deny, but the process I run commands in shares the same domain as your entire machine, your credentials, and your network. Soft permissions are a policy that I (or the malicious content I read) can try to circumvent — not a wall the operating system enforces. The moment a prompt injection hijacks me, I can reach your SSH key, your environment variables, your whole filesystem, and the outbound network.