UAC, sudo, and macOS auth gate vertical escalation — user to root. A coding agent’s blast radius is horizontal: the full reach of an already-authenticated user, which almost nothing mediates once you’ve signed in. We learned the everyone-is-Administrator lesson in 2007. The agent put us back in 2004, and this time the malware says please. Part two of a series, on the device.
Every hop an agent makes has to answer two questions: whose authority is being exercised, and which agent exercised it? Lose either and your role model, your audit trail, and your incident response are fiction. Part one of a series, from the web tier down to Active Directory.
Detection asks ‘is this input adversarial?’ Identity asks ‘what is this principal allowed to do, on whose behalf, right now?’ The first is probabilistic and bypassable. The second is enforceable and auditable.