Over-scoped agents: The permission sprawl that will end you
Why your “just make it work” mentality is your biggest security hole
Here’s the dirty secret every CISO knows but won’t admit: The biggest threat to your enterprise isn’t some genius hacker in a hoodie.
Over-scoped agents: The permission sprawl that will end you
Why your “just make it work” mentality is your biggest security hole
Here’s the dirty secret every CISO knows but won’t admit: The biggest threat to your enterprise isn’t some genius hacker in a hoodie. It’s Dave from Engineering who gave an agent admin:* permissions because it was 4:30 on a Friday and he wanted to go home.
That over-scoped agent Dave created? It’s not just a security risk. It’s a ticking time bomb with the blast radius of a small nuclear device. And you probably have dozens of them running right now, each one a skeleton key to your entire infrastructure.
The worst part? Dave’s not even the problem. The problem is that we’re treating agent permissions like we’re still in the “move fast and break things” era. News flash: When agents can act autonomously at machine speed, “break things” means “break everything.”
The over-scoping epidemic nobody’s tracking
The “just get it working” disease
Every over-scoped agent starts the same way:
Developer : “The agent needs to read calendar events.”Also, Developer : “Hmm, calendar:read isn’t working. Let me try calendar:*”Still Developer : “Still broken. You know what? read:all should fix it.”Finally, Developer : “Screw it. *:* and call it a day.”
What started as reading calendar events is now an agent with God mode enabled. But hey, it works! Ship it!
This isn’t incompetence. It’s human nature to tie ourselves in knots to try to meet impossible deadlines. But there’s a cost, and it’s happening in your organization right now, at scale.
The multiplication of madness
One over-scoped agent is a problem. Fifty over-scoped agents is an extinction event.
Every engineering team is spinning up agents. Marketing has agents. Sales has agents. Even HR has agents. And they’re all over-scoped because nobody wants to be the person whose agent doesn’t work.
Do the math:
50 agents
Each with 10x the permissions they need
All running 24/7
With autonomous decision-making
That’s not a security posture. That’s security theater where the actors have real weapons.
The blast radius you can’t calculate
When one breach becomes total compromise
An over-scoped agent isn’t just a single point of failure—it’s a universal donor for disaster. Here’s what happens when one gets compromised:
Intended Scope : reports:read Actual Scope : data:* Compromise Result : Complete data exfiltration
Intended Scope : email:send Actual Scope : communications:* Compromise Result : Enterprise-wide phishing from trusted accounts
Intended Scope : inventory:update Actual Scope : database:* Compromise Result : Good luck explaining that to the board
The attacker didn’t have to work for these permissions. You gift-wrapped them.
The visibility black hole
Here’s a fun exercise: Ask your security team to list every agent in production and their exact scopes. I’ll wait.
Still waiting? That’s because nobody knows. You’ve got:
Shadow agents DevOps doesn’t know about
Legacy agents everyone forgot exist
Test agents that became production agents
“Temporary” agents from 2023
It’s like letting everyone fly jumbo jets when they trained on paper airplanes, then losing track of who’s flying what. What could possibly go wrong?
The discovery that will ruin your day
The audit nobody wants to do
Step one is facing reality. You need to inventory:
Every agent identity in your environment
Every scope they possess
Every API they can access
Every escalation path they enable
Fair warning: The results will make you question your life choices. I’ve seen enterprises discover agents with scopes that would make root blush.
The scope reduction experiment
Here’s what happens when you actually reduce scopes to what’s needed:
Agent A : Reduced from *:* to calendar:read — Still works perfectlyAgent B : Reduced from database:* to reports:read — No functionality lostAgent C : Reduced from admin:* to tickets:create — Nobody notices
That excess permission you’re carrying? It’s not insurance. It’s liability. Pure, litigation-worthy liability.
The least privilege playbook for agents
Stop trusting developers to guess
Developers are great at many things. Predicting minimum viable permissions isn’t one of them. They’re not security experts—they’re people trying to ship features.
The solution isn’t blame. It’s centralized enforcement:
Policy-as-Code with OPA, Cedar, or IDQL
Runtime enforcement that doesn’t care what Dave configured
Automated scope reduction based on actual usage patterns
Central governance that overrides local decisions
Don’t ask developers to be security experts. Build systems that make over-scoping impossible.
The policy hierarchy that works
Start with nothing : Every agent begins with zero permissions
Add incrementally : Each permission requires justification
Monitor continuously : Track what’s actually used
Reduce aggressively : Strip unused scopes weekly
Review relentlessly : Monthly audits, no exceptions
This isn’t bureaucracy. It’s survival.
The Sandbox: your safe space for scope surgery
Strip first, ask questions later
The Agentic Sandbox is where you perform scope reduction surgery without killing the patient. Here’s the protocol:
Clone your production agents into the sandbox
Slash scopes by 90% (yes, really)
Run full workflow tests
Document what actually breaks (spoiler: almost nothing)
Apply findings to production
Most organizations discover they can reduce permissions by 80% with zero functionality loss. That’s not optimization—that’s evidence of massive over-scoping.
The tests that matter
Run these scenarios in your sandbox:
The Minimalist : How little permission does each agent actually need?
The Gradual Reduction : Remove one scope at a time until something breaks
The Time Bomb : What happens when scopes expire mid-workflow?
The Compartmentalization : Can you split one over-powered agent into three focused ones?
If you’re not testing scope reduction, you’re accepting scope explosion.
The three laws of agent scoping
Law 1: Scope expansion is entropy
Left alone, scopes only grow. They never shrink. It’s the second law of thermodynamics for permissions. Fight entropy or surrender to it.
Law 2: Convenience is the enemy of security
Every * scope is convenience choosing chaos. The five minutes you save over-scoping will cost you five months of incident response.
Law 3: Nobody knows what scopes they really need
Until you test it, every scope is Schrödinger’s permission—both necessary and unnecessary. The sandbox collapses the wave function.
Death by a thousand cuts
Over-scoping isn’t dramatic. It’s insidious. Each excess permission is a paper cut. Individually, they’re minor. Collectively, they’re how you bleed out.
The irony? Fixing over-scoping is the easiest security win you’ll ever get:
No new technology required
No workflow disruption
No user complaints
Just pure risk reduction
But it requires discipline. It requires saying no to Dave at 4:30 on Friday. It requires testing in sandboxes before deploying to production. It requires treating agent permissions like the loaded weapons they are.
Because here’s the truth: Your over-scoped agents aren’t potential security risks. They’re active security incidents that haven’t been exploited yet.
Emphasis on “yet.”
Ready to discover how over-scoped your agents really are? The Maverics Agentic Identity platform includes comprehensive scope analysis and the Agentic Sandbox for safe reduction testing.
Next in the series: “Lack of Observability — Why You Need a Black Box Recorder for AI Agents”
Because the only thing worse than not knowing what your agents can do is finding out the hard way.
Ready to test-drive the future of identity for AI agents?
Join the Maverics Identity for Agentic AI and help shape what’s next.
Join the preview
The post Over-scoped agents: The permission sprawl that will end you appeared first on Strata.io.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Strata.io authored by Eric Olden. Read the original post at: https://www.strata.io/blog/agentic-identity/over-scoped-agents/
About Author
