Designing Trust Boundaries for Agent-to-Agent Systems

I share lessons from a SoftBank proof of concept for an agent firewall, focusing on how organizations can define trust boundaries and inspect agent-to-agent communication. The presentation also introduces the broader Agent SecOps concept and discusses practical trade-offs in policy enforcement.

■ Agent firewall and trust boundaries
- How the proof of concept identifies communicating agents, checks permissions, and inspects messages
- Why enterprise trust boundaries may need to extend beyond protocol interfaces to agents’ external actions

■ Policy inspection and implementation challenges
- Rule-based checks versus model-based semantic inspection, including latency, cost, and auditability considerations
- Streaming responses, non-deterministic judgments, and the scope of the presentation; MCP, tool calls, and agent data access are excluded

I address engineers and teams designing governance or security controls for AI agents. Use the discussion to review which actions and agents need protection, then prioritize deterministic checks and reserve semantic inspection for cases that require contextual understanding.