MCP Dev Summit North America

Recent advancements in agentic AI have unlocked powerful new capabilities, however, they also introduce fundamentally new security risks. In this talk, I present a system-level view of the security landscape of agentic AI, drawing on a comprehensive systematization of attacks and defenses across modern agent architectures.

I show how increasing agent flexibility along different dimensions expands attack surfaces and enables threats such as prompt injection, memory poisoning, unsafe data flows, credential leakage, and unauthorized execution. Using real-world incidents and CVE analyses, I illustrate how agents can be manipulated through external content, compromised tools, or poisoned internal components.

The talk also provides a systematic overview of end-to-end automatic red teaming and risk assessment for agentic AI systems as well as a defense-in-depth framework for building secure agentic systems, spanning runtime guardrails, access control, information-flow tracking, privilege separation, and secure-by-design architectures, helping practitioners assess risk, close security gaps, and deploy agents safely at scale.