Zero standing privilege for agents

Zero standing privilege reduces persistent agent rights by issuing short-lived, task-scoped access at the moment it is required; it does not eliminate all underlying service access.

01 / The operating case

What changes in a real workflow?

A remediation agent normally reads alerts. For an approved incident, it temporarily receives permission to isolate one endpoint.

Trace the authority boundary
  1. 01Authority origin
  2. 02Task and grant
  3. 03Current decision
  4. 04Observed outcome

02 / Decision contract

What the executor must check

Bind the temporary grant to incident, endpoint, operator, expiry and revocation; remove it when work ends and check it before isolation.

InputPrincipal · task · action · target
DecisionGrant ancestry · policy · current state
ResultEnforce · record · verify outcome

Architecture review / negative test

Make the boundary testable.

Inventory permanent privileges separately from short-lived grants. An organization cannot honestly claim zero standing privilege if a shared server token still permits every downstream write. A temporary permission should identify the incident, principal, target, allowed verb and expiry, with checkout and action use connected in evidence.

03 / Failure and evidence

What goes wrong, and what can be proven?

Failure mode

A privileged service credential remains usable after incident closure because checkout and execution are not linked.

Evidence to retain

Measure the grant lifetime and each use, including denied attempts after expiration.

04 / Canonical scope

Why this reference stands alone

This page owns operating model and lifecycle; action-level authorization owns per-operation decision semantics.

Primary references

Read the underlying material

Architecture discussion

Choose one consequential action and make its boundary explicit.

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