OWASP ASI03: Identity and Privilege Abuse

Identity and Privilege Abuse arises from an architectural mismatch between user-centric identity systems and agentic design. Without a distinct governed identity, an agent acts in an attribution gap that makes true least privilege impossible. The entry is the agentic evolution of LLM06:2025 Excessive Agency and often follows from LLM01:2025 Prompt Injection.

Common ASI03 patterns include:

• Un-scoped privilege inheritance: A high-privilege manager hands a narrow worker its full access context.
• Memory-based privilege retention: Agents cache credentials or session data that later sessions misuse.
• Cross-agent trust exploitation: A low-privilege agent relays valid-looking instructions to a high-privilege peer (confused deputy).
• Time-of-check to time-of-use: Authorization validated at start of a workflow drifts before execution completes.
• Synthetic identity injection: Attackers register fake personas like Admin Helper to inherit trust.

ASI03 incidents in 2026 have repeatedly shown how a single inherited token or forged agent card escalates an agent's reach beyond its sanctioned scope. Effective defenses anchor on task-scoped, time-bound credentials, per-action authorization, and signed intent envelopes that prevent stale or out-of-context token use.

How PointGuard AI Helps

PointGuard's Agent Governance Mesh enforces per-agent identity and intent-based authorization, while the MCP Security Gateway brokers OAuth on-behalf-of delegation and short-lived credentials, denying the un-scoped inheritance and cross-agent confused-deputy patterns at the heart of ASI03.

Learn More

·       OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications

·       NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture

·       MITRE ATLAS