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Then we could secure the agent (there's more work to be done here anyway)That's the problem, though. How do you secure the agent? How do you make sure that the program talking to the agent is doing something good and not evil with the request?
Yes, there is some defense-in-depth advantage to making this change, but the thing you're trying to solve here is that you can pip install thing X and have thing X run ssh with your credentials if thing X isn't evil, and you want to automatically determine whether it's evil.
> Imagine you run a job, which reaches out via Paramiko to fifteen servers, you see a brief notification saying the agent signed 15 logins for Paramiko. That makes sense. An hour later, reading the TPS reports, the agent notifies you again, Paramiko just signed another login. Huh?
That seems like it defeats only the most naive malware. Why wouldn't the malicious Python module sit around and wait for you to make a legitimate SSH connection? Would you notice if your agent signed 16 connections instead of 15? (What if it made one of the requests time out so it kept it at 15 notifications?)
Remember that the problem you're trying to solve is to prevent arbitrary code from being evil. This is basically equivalent to the antivirus problem, and there's a long history of appealing-sounding, naive, and ultimately useless solutions to the antivirus problem.