🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes, 2025, the “year of the agent.” For us in the security world, it was the year of the unauthenticated, over-privileged agent with persistent state and an unconstrained execution environment. But please, tell me more about how its architecture is based on self-help books. I’m sure that will hold up during the incident response post-mortem.

So, let me get this straight. The grand secret to "agentic intelligence" is to give a notoriously unpredictable stochastic parrot a notebook. You call it a “scratchpad.” I call it a staging server for exfiltration. You see an external hard drive for a Turing machine; I see a plain-text log of every secret, every API key, and every embarrassing user query it's ever processed, just sitting there in a world-readable S3 bucket. You’re not giving it memory; you’re giving it a permanent, unencrypted diary of its every thought crime.

"By externalizing their internal state onto a digital piece of paper, agents evolve from simple pattern-matchers into robust thinkers."

Bless your heart. By externalizing its internal state, you’re creating the most glorious attack vector I’ve seen all year. You’ve taken prompt injection—which was already a dumpster fire—and given it state. Now an attacker doesn’t just get a one-off malicious response. No, now they can poison the well. They can inject a malicious instruction into the “scratchpad,” and the agent will refer back to its little “notes” later, executing the payload with the full trust it gives its own "thoughts." You’ve invented Persistent Cross-Site Scripting for LLMs. Congratulations, I guess a new OWASP Top 10 category is in order. Have fun explaining to your SOC 2 auditor why your "memory buffer" contains customer PII, internal IP addresses, and the nuclear launch codes, all because someone asked it to write a poem about DROP TABLE users;.

And then we have this masterpiece: "Thinking is Just Talking to Yourself in a Loop." You call it an internal monologue. I call it a denial-of-service vulnerability waiting for a clever prompt. “Act/Write → Reason → Repeat.” What happens when the "reason" step gets stuck on a paradox? Or when a cleverly crafted input sends it into an infinite loop of self-correction, burning CPU cycles and racking up a cloud bill that looks like a phone number? You’re not building a thinker; you’re building the world’s most expensive while(true) loop. And the idea that this internal text is “hidden from the user” is adorable. Nothing is hidden. It’s just one log file away from a public data breach notification.

But my favorite part—my absolute favorite—is the “Alter Ego Effect.” The multi-agent system. Oh, this is beautiful. You’re not just building one insecure, unpredictable system; you're building a whole committee of them and making them talk to each other over what I can only assume are unauthenticated internal APIs.

Let’s break down this dream team:

• "The Architect": A single point of failure that designs the whole insecure workflow.
• "The Engineer": An agent whose sole purpose is to write code, probably by scraping Stack Overflow for the most popular, most vulnerable code snippets.
• "The Critic": An agent that's supposed to review the code. What happens when an attacker compromises "The Critic" and has it approve every malicious pull request? You've just automated your own supply chain attack. It's genius, in a terrifying way.
• "The Advisor": This one is the crown jewel. A meta-agent with oversight over all the others. You mean a high-privilege god-bot that, if compromised, gives an attacker keys to the entire kingdom.

You think you’re creating checks and balances. I see a daisy chain of exploitable dependencies. Each agent is a potential pivot point. You’re not constraining the search space; you’re expanding the attack surface exponentially. Beyoncé needed Sasha Fierce for the stage. Your system has "CVE-2025-Database-Admin," the agent that thinks its secret identity is a root shell.

And then, right at the end, after building this whole teetering Jenga tower of self-help psychology and unverified loops, you whisper the magic words: "formal methods." As if sprinkling some mathematics on top will retroactively fix the fact that your core architecture is a series of RCEs duct-taped together. That’s like building a house out of dry tinder and then claiming it’s fireproof because you wrote the blueprint in LaTeX.

It always comes back to the same thing, doesn't it? No matter how fancy the model, how "agentic" the system, it all eventually needs to write something down. And for fifty years, we've been trying to teach developers that the database isn't your friend. It's not a diary. It's a loaded weapon. And you've just handed it to a toddler with an internet connection.