+Intertrace Insights
Approvals and enforcement
Deciding each action before it runs, asking people only when it matters, and failing safely.
- Pieces
- 57
- Threat research
- 16
- Updated
- Oct 20, 2026
7 pieces · newest first
Threat research12 min read
366 ways to make a destructive action look harmless
We built a corpus of 366 agent tool calls, each disguised to read smaller than it is, and 102 near-identical harmless twins. The pattern is blunt: the tool name tells you almost nothing, and two thirds of the risk is a shell string.
Intertrace Threat Research
Guide11 min read
Approval fatigue: fewer asks mean more oversight, not less
Human approval for agents fails when people get dozens of identical prompts a day. The case for asking less: ask by consequence, turn repeated asks into scoped grants, remember only similar calls, budget approvals, and build screens a person can decide on in ten seconds.
Intertrace
Guide10 min read
When the policy check fails: the questions to settle before agent enforcement goes down
What should an agent do when its policy service is slow or down? The questions a design review asks about timeouts, cached decisions, retries and streaming, answered: route a missing decision by consequence, bound the cache, and key retries to the intended action.
Intertrace
Technical paper9 min read
The loosening hidden in a tightening: shipping agent policy changes with replay
One pull request against a procurement agent's policy, followed through rule tests, a 30-day decision replay, monitor mode, staged enforcement and an audit link to the commit, showing why peer review backed by a decision diff beats a change board.
Intertrace
Threat research10 min read
Approved is not executed: replay, substitution and check-to-use gaps in agent approvals
A person approves one action and a different one runs: edited arguments, re-resolved recipients, replayed permits, stale authority, duplicate retries. A step-by-step teardown of one approved payment that went wrong twice, and the bindings and tests that close the check-to-use window.
Intertrace Threat Research
Technical paper9 min read
The cost of a guardrail: latency and inference budgets for runtime AI security
Every runtime security check spends latency and money on the request path, and the share of traffic sent to an LLM judge sets both your bill and your p99. Six decisions, in order, for building a guardrail product teams will keep switched on.
Intertrace
Guide10 min read
Guardrails developers won't route around: a checklist for the governed path
When an AI control is slower or more confusing than calling the model directly, developers switch to a personal key and the control protects nothing. A checklist for making the governed path the easiest one, with a test for each item.
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