r/AskNetsec • u/-Devlin- • 11h ago

Concepts Does runtime context prioritization fall apart with agentic workloads?

Last year we brought on a tool to get runtime context on our workloads and help prioritize vulns, mostly to cut noise based on what’s actually loaded in memory. At the time it seemed like a no brainer, since direct exploitation or even chained attacks mostly can’t work against components just sitting on the filesystem.

We ran a threat modeling exercise the other day on some new systems running AI agents with tool access, and in some cases a shell. It got me thinking: can’t the agent load anything it needs at any point, unlike older deterministic code? And if so, doesn’t runtime context based prioritization fall apart completely?

Can anyone with practical experience in this area chime in? I’m at my wits end brainstorming hypotheticals with GPT.

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u/Adorable_Pay1996 10h ago

yeah the agent turns into the loader and that kills the whole model of "it's not in memory so ignore it"

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u/Prudent-Parfait-1541 10h ago

An agent can load tools or libraries when needed, so looking only at what’s active at a given moment can miss potential risks. I’d treat runtime context as one useful signal, not the whole picture.

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u/-Devlin- 9h ago

Yeah i wasn’t even considering dynamically loaded tools here so that further increases the surface area. What do you think of longer term runtime profiling as opposed to a given moment?