That said, while I'm hardly a fan of MCP (judge for yourself by reviewing my previous comments on the matter), at least its security model was standardised around OAuth, which in my opinion is a good thing, albeit with a few small issues.
I personally prefer CLIs, but their security is in fact worse. A lot worse! Sure, we can now store API keys in a vault, but it's not like you can rotate or expire them easily. Plus, the security model around APIs is based on path-based rules, which aren't very effective given that most services use REST-style APIs. This is even worse for GraphQL, JSON-RPC, and similar protocols.
It is backwards. I bet we will move from CLIs to something else in about 3-6 months.
These kinds of things aren't common enough for me to want to set up a programmatic policy, and are also low sensitivity enough that I don't mind giving access to complete the task. If it later asks to log into my bank, I decline.
I know the devil's in the details for how to actually do this well, but I would love if someone figured it out.
I still wouldn't give to any claw access to my mail accounts, but it is a step in the good direction.
I love how NanoClaw is aggregating the effort of making personal assistants more secure.
Good job!
1. Full secret-memory isolation whereby an agent with root privileges can't exfilrate. Let's assume my agent is prompt injected to write a full-permissions script to spin up OneCli, modify the docker container, log all of the requests w/ secrets to a file outside the container, exfiltrate.
2. An intent layer on top of agents that models "you have access to my gmail (authN) but you can only act on emails where you are a participant". This would be more similar to universal RBAC between agent ↔ mcp etc.
I've been building on [2] for a while now using signed tokens expressing intent.
It’s not that agents have access to something the shouldn’t have but that the creates havoc exactly with the access they are allowed to have.
Nice idea, but it will not work. Agents are so resourceful and determined, they will find that weird call which can delete all emails with one request (/delete?filter=*)
Or is that a man in the middle "attack". And users have to install a certificate?