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Ask HN: Best practice securing secrets on local machines working with agents?

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Re: Ask HN: Best practice securing secrets on local machines working with agents?

#11
post #6

TBH, the best pattern I've seen is just nuking the secrets at the input level. Run a local regex watcher in-memory that flags anything looking like a PK or seed phrase before it even hits the agent's context window. Keeps it off the network stack entirely

Any prompt injection attack could by pass this by simply do a base64 or any encoding, I guess?

You ar absolutely right. Obfuscation like Base64 or rot13 will always beat static Regex. I was thinking more in terms of a seatbelt for accidental leaks user error rather than a defense against adversarial prompt injection. It's about reducing the blast radius of clumsy mistakes, not stopping a determined attacker.

Re: Ask HN: Best practice securing secrets on local machines working with agents?

#13
Concrete setup: (1) All secrets in 1Password/Bitwarden with CLI, (2) Agent sandbox with no env var access, (3) Wrapper scripts that fetch secrets on-demand and inject at runtime, (4) Context scrubbers that strip secrets before LLM sees logs. Key insight: don't prevent agent access to secrets, prevent secrets from entering agent context/logs. Different problem, solvable with tooling.

Re: Ask HN: Best practice securing secrets on local machines working with agents?

#14
post #9
post #4

Run the agent in a sandbox without access to production secrets.

What if you simply need to give them access. E.g if you want them to do code review you have to at least give them code repo read access. But you don't know if the environment where agent runs will be compromised

If you give read access with their own api key they will only get read access, the access that you gave them. Not sure what is the issue.
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