How Secrets Leak Through AI Agents (and How to Stop It) — Venice AI

This talk details how secrets can leak through AI agent systems, focusing on logs capturing prompts and secrets, and secrets fetched directly into the reasoning layer. It proposes several patterns to mitigate these leaks: using hashed IDs instead of personal data, split-key custody for encrypted storage, revocable handles for temporary access, narrow agent scope to limit blast radius, a classifier to screen for prompt injection, wiring vaults to the execution layer instead of the LLM, sandboxes with permission monitoring, and confidential compute with verifiable attestations. The talk also identifies confidential tool calls as an open problem.