The promptware attack vector is real and worth taking seriously. What I find interesting is that the defenses are mostly structural: constrained directive systems, explicit tool boundaries, and deterministic task loops that don't accept arbitrary runtime instructions.
The most robust agent architectures I've seen treat prompts like read-only config - the agent reads its directive at startup but can't modify its own behavior during execution. This limits what an attacker can achieve even if they do manage injection.
Still, as agents gain more capabilities (file access, web browsing, external APIs), the attack surface expands. Security in this space will probably look less like traditional sandboxing and more like capability-based permission systems.
The promptware attack vector is real and worth taking seriously. What I find interesting is that the defenses are mostly structural: constrained directive systems, explicit tool boundaries, and deterministic task loops that don't accept arbitrary runtime instructions.
The most robust agent architectures I've seen treat prompts like read-only config - the agent reads its directive at startup but can't modify its own behavior during execution. This limits what an attacker can achieve even if they do manage injection.
Still, as agents gain more capabilities (file access, web browsing, external APIs), the attack surface expands. Security in this space will probably look less like traditional sandboxing and more like capability-based permission systems.