AI gateways give enterprises a checkpoint to stop agent attacks

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:06

   What's unique about what's happening now? Like, what's something that the mainstream public should be aware of? So, yeah, as you say, in the last 24 hours, you know, we had P2P, two shells, a bunch of gateways got compromised. And it's increasing. The frequency is increasing. i think the attackers are just becoming more sophisticated by leveraging models and the defense is not is like you have now nationwide type of attacker powers by leveraging models and the the companies are not uh they haven't like defended their self through a model security models i think that's that's what's happening and you know all the agentic enterprise and the gentix coding is It's creating a whole new real estate, a whole new surface that is at times non-deterministic.

2. 2:00

   Most of the time it's non-deterministic. And you don't know what actually is in between those. And that creates a lot of empty spot to be attacked and to be more vulnerable than before. I think at Kong, we run one of the largest enterprise AI gateway fleet. And not only we show identity to agents, but we also we do re-limiting, blocking and, you know, kind of having a quill switch. And this is this is becoming a large risk into boardrooms of, you know, the Fortune 500s.

3. 2:34

   Yeah, no, this is really fascinating. I mean, you have on one end, you have the attacker versus the defender. And for a lot of people, especially if you're using open models, if everyone has the same model and access, then really it's who can pull together resources to pay for compute. And as you alluded to, a lot of these hackers aren't necessarily an indie hacker in their basement just trying to attack a company.

4. 2:58

   Oftentimes you have entire countries that are pulling resources together to be able to attack American companies. And it's getting into some of these national security questions as well. And so let's talk a little bit about what the defender needs. You alluded to a few things that around kill switches, around permissions, around tracking. What does the defender need to be successful here? Yeah, at the core, you know, we're not a security company, but definitely they need to.

5. 3:26

   So you can divide it in three ways, at least how we see it. Obviously, I need to have a very strong security providers, like the usual suspect for security specific, call it endpoint security. That's evolving. So there is one piece of like, let's, the season is to buy their own security products. Then, but now it's becoming, it's not just an IT problem where you buy identity companies and IDP and all these things were used to secure and authenticate a workforce, but now it's becoming an R&D problem.

6. 3:57

   What is changing is also becoming an infrastructure. problem. It's not just an IT or a security type of problem because the agents are more of a code and an infrastructural problem. So that's the thing where you have to have a very strong advanced security platform. You'll have to think differently from your IT posture where it's not just IDP providers or all this type of, you know, Okta, all this kind of thing. They're still there for the workforce, but the new workforce is going to be agents.

7. 4:30

   And three, infrastructure is where it's the most vulnerable. That's why we're seeing a lot of attacks on infrastructure, like software infrastructure, because that was not ready for an agentic world. And so what we are seeing, and we didn't like, naturally, like we got pulled into, is that gateways are becoming very strategic because in the code, gateways are like deterministic AI choke points. And by being a deterministic AI checkpoint, no matter what happens, you have boundaries and you can block if you can capture.

8. 4:54

   So what do they need? the AI observability to see what's going on, how it all connected. But what is really hard is to have the kill switch. There is no, most of the enterprise or nation, they don't really have a kill switch today. That's, I think, is the next frontier. Yeah, that's what the next frontier will be. This is really interesting when you say around the gateway. I know that's what you guys are quite famous for as well and what a lot of enterprises use, Kong for. And so when it comes to the actual gateway, how you say that's a point, a very specific point where you can actually determine what's going on, where you start to assess, like, where, like, especially for a very long horizon tasks, you can actually assess it during that switch, what's happening within the gateway. Where does the kill switch come in? Why is that a really hard problem?

9. 5:44

   So there are different types of gateways, and I touch, there are two paths forming in an enterprise, right? There is the intelligent path, which is the token path, and people buying inference, consuming models. And there is the execution path, which is agent consuming APIs, MCP server to get stuff done. So actually, there is two paths in enterprise, token path and execution path. Pong brings them together. In the execution path, you have APIs, And so you have API gateway.

10. 6:13

    That's what we started with. In the token path, you have AI gateways, MCP gateways, and agent gateways. Assuming you have a fleet of all gateways inside enterprise for in and out AI traffic, that obviously proxy API requests, MCP2 calls, tokens, and you have all sorts of observabilities. Where the kill switch comes is where it can be a cost problem, it can be a security problem, where you can intercept that traffic, whether it's human-generated traffic or a gently generated traffic and you can just do rate limiting or throttling or just block and within a second the gate close and that that transaction doesn't happen anymore what is an agent mcp that's the uniqueness right they they are i go back to ai chuck points and you have the checkpoint you have the gateway so there's no other technology in the world other than gateways and so

11. 7:04

    that's why they're becoming strategic in the api world you have gateways for powering mobile applications between the backend microservices and your mobile apps that's fine but in the i world token paths its cost and an execution path it could be risk if it's not secure or cannot be blocked because agent can go and ping api and do some damage or make some payment they should not have i think that these two things are getting merged um and uh yeah it's a new paradigm is a new architectural shift where you just gotta deploy all sort of gateway as quickly as possible to make sure you can block when you have to block.

12. 7:41

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