Topic starter
02/08/2026 11:32 am
TL;DR: Agent-to-agent workflows using A2A and MCP shift AI risk from human-reviewed prompts to millisecond internal handoffs, creating east-west attack paths that traditional edge controls often miss, according to Salt. The governing assumption that a human can still catch bad logic before execution is collapsing as agents act and delegate faster than review cycles can respond.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Salt: “AI Agent-to-Agent Communication: The Next Major Attack Surface”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when agent approval depends on human-style review workflows instead of runtime controls?
A: Human-style review breaks because it checks work after the fact and cannot keep pace with an agent that can take many actions quickly.
Q: Why do authenticated agent calls still create security risk?
A: Authentication proves that a request came from a known identity, but it does not prove the request is legitimate in context.
Q: How do teams detect unsafe agent-to-agent behaviour?
A: Look for internal calls that deviate from an agent’s normal sequence, timing, or target system.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory agent delegation chains Map every agent-to-agent path, including internal API hops, service accounts, and shadow endpoints that move work between agents.
- Constrain agent privileges by downstream task Reduce each agent to the smallest action set needed for its specific role, and separate customer-facing agents from billing, database, and remediation actions.
- Monitor east-west agent behaviour Baseline normal agent call sequences, request timing, and payload patterns, then alert on unusual internal requests such as unexpected table dumps or off-cycle refund logic.
Bottom line: Agent-to-agent systems create identity risk inside the trust boundary, where service accounts and internal APIs can move malicious context as easily as legitimate work.
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02/08/2026 12:47 pm
Agent-to-agent workflows create a delegation risk that perimeter identity models do not contain. Once software entities hand work to each other through internal APIs, the trust decision shifts from authentication to delegation. That changes the control problem for NHI governance, because valid credentials no longer prove that the downstream action is appropriate. Practitioners need to treat the delegation chain as the unit of risk, not the individual login.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should organisations govern east-west agent traffic?
A: Treat internal agent traffic as a governed trust path, not as harmless backend chatter. That means inventorying agents, limiting their privileges, and applying monitoring to internal APIs and service-account-backed calls. The governance question is who may delegate to whom, and under what conditions that delegation remains valid.
👉 Read our full editorial: Agent-to-agent identity risk is exposing new east-west attack paths