Agentic AI security glossary

The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol is an open standard designed for interoperability between different autonomous agents. It allows specialized agents to discover each other, delegate tasks, and collaborate on complex workflows using a standardized communication and security framework, often leveraging OAuth and digital signatures for message integrity.

Account takeover (ATO) is a type of identity theft where an unauthorized user gains full control over a legitimate user's account. This is typically achieved through automated methods like credential stuffing or by exploiting API authentication flaws, allowing the attacker to steal sensitive data or perform fraudulent transactions as the victim.

Agentic AI refers to autonomous AI agents that act as "digital employees," using Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for execution. Unlike simple chatbots, agentic AI can improvise its own workflows and use enterprise tools to achieve complex goals at machine speed, requiring a new security paradigm focused on the "action layer" where these agents interact with data.

An agentic workflow is a series of steps or tasks that an AI agent improvises autonomously to achieve a given goal. Unlike traditional software workflows, which follow static, predefined paths, agentic workflows are dynamic and machine-speed, often making them invisible to legacy security monitoring tools that expect predictable traffic patterns.

AI governance is a strategic framework of rules and controls designed to ensure that AI systems are used responsibly, ethically, and securely. It involves meeting regulatory requirements, such as the EU AI Act, by using the API layer as the primary control plane for managing data integrity, system robustness, and the auditability of autonomous interactions.

AI orchestration is the coordinated management of multiple AI models, autonomous agents, and enterprise data sources to automate sophisticated workflows. It manages the sequencing, failure handling, and resource usage of AI systems, ensuring that reasoning translates into authorized and compliant execution across the enterprise.

An API endpoint is a specific location, typically a unique URL, where an API receives requests for resources or services. It represents the digital "door" an application must knock on to access a specific function, such as retrieving a user profile, processing a payment, or connecting an AI agent to a database.

An API gateway is a mediation point that sits between a client and a collection of backend services. It acts as a traffic controller, performing essential operational tasks such as routing requests, enforcing rate limits, and handling basic authentication to ensure requests conform to defined schemas before they reach the internal infrastructure.

An API key is a unique string of characters used to identify and authenticate a calling application or user to an API.

While common for basic identification, relying on static API keys as the sole authentication method is a significant security risk, as they are often exposed in client-side code or intercepted in transit if not managed properly.

In a cybersecurity context, API posture is the proactive state of an organization's API environment hardening. It focuses on the "Govern" phase of security, ensuring that digital assets are configured according to established standards, that permissions are limited to the least privilege necessary, and that any "drift" from the security baseline is remediated.

API Posture Management is the proactive process of continuously analyzing an organization's API landscape to identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited. This includes detecting security misconfigurations, excessive permissions, exposed credentials, and deviations from corporate or regulatory security standards.

API security is a dedicated domain of cybersecurity focused on discovering, governing, and protecting an organization's entire API ecosystem. It goes beyond basic gateway controls to address complex "business logic" attacks, identifying when an authenticated user or AI agent uses legitimate API calls to perform unauthorized or malicious actions.

API sprawl is the unmanaged and undocumented proliferation of APIs across diverse AI deployments, cloud environments, microservices, and third-party integrations. This lack of centralized oversight creates a massive visibility gap, making it difficult for security teams to maintain an accurate inventory or know which APIs are accessing sensitive data.

An API vulnerability is a flaw in the design, implementation, or configuration of an API that can be exploited by an adversary. Many API vulnerabilities are rooted in "broken logic," where the API functions correctly according to its code but allow for unauthorized data access due to flawed authorization or resource handling.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a standardized set of rules that allow different software applications to communicate and share data. APIs serve as the building blocks of modern digital architecture, acting as the primary conduits that link front-end user experiences to back-end services and data.

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a framework for orchestrating and managing the security of applications throughout their lifecycle. It unifies findings from various testing tools with production configuration data to prioritize risks and ensure that security standards are consistently applied from development to production.

The attack surface is the total sum of all entry points, vulnerabilities, and assets that an unauthorized user could exploit to access or exfiltrate data. In modern enterprise environments, the proliferation of cloud services, APIs, and autonomous AI agents has significantly expanded this surface, often beyond the view of traditional perimeter security tools.

The complexity threshold is the tipping point where an AI system becomes so intricate that its behavior can no longer be fully predicted or traced by its human creators. Crossing this threshold can lead to "emergent capabilities," making it essential for security teams to implement continuous behavioral auditing and intent analysis to maintain control.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers designed to cache and serve web content closer to end users. By reducing the physical distance data must travel, CDNs improve website performance and availability while providing a first line of defense against volumetric threats like DDoS attacks.

Context awareness is the ability of a security system to intelligently analyze a request by evaluating the surrounding "story." This includes identifying the user or agent, the normal behavioral baseline, and the potential business impact, allowing the system to differentiate between a benign anomaly and a malicious intent to exfiltrate data.

Credential stuffing is an automated cyberattack where threat actors use large lists of stolen usernames and passwords to attempt to log in to unrelated services. This method exploits the common practice of password reuse, employing bots to test thousands of credentials per minute to achieve fraudulent account takeovers across multiple platforms.

A firewall is a network security device that monitors and filters incoming and outgoing traffic based on a defined set of security rules. It acts as a barrier between a trusted internal network and untrusted external environments, such as the internet, primarily focusing on blocking unauthorized access at the network layer based on IP addresses and protocol types.

Human in the loop (HITL) is an oversight mechanism where an AI system is required to pause and obtain human approval before taking high-risk actions. This ensures that even when AI operates at machine speed, critical decisions remain aligned with human intent, corporate safety policies, and regulatory compliance mandates.

MCP security involves securing the connection point between AI models and enterprise tools provided by the Model Context Protocol. Specialized security is required here to prevent "line jumping", where prompt injection is used to trick an agent into calling unauthorized tools, and to ensure agents cannot abuse their connectivity to exfiltrate sensitive data.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging industry standard that provides a universal way for AI agents to connect to tools, data, and context. It functions as the "hands" of the agent, enabling a Large Language Model (LLM) to reach into enterprise systems and execute API calls to perform specific tasks toward assigned goals.

A Multi-agent system (MAS) is an environment where multiple autonomous AI agents collaborate and interact to solve complex problems. By assigning specialized tasks to different agents, such as one for data retrieval and another for analysis, MAS architectures provide greater resilience and specialization than single-agent models.

Multimodal AI refers to machine learning models capable of processing and integrating multiple types of input data simultaneously, including text, images, audio, and video. This allows AI systems to interpret context more effectively and generate more nuanced outputs by reasoning across diverse sources of evidence.

The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is the global standard for formally describing RESTful APIs. It provides a language-agnostic interface that allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service, including its endpoints and authentication methods, without needing access to the underlying source code.

The OWASP Top 10 is a globally recognized framework that identifies the most critical security risks to web applications. The "OWASP API Security Top 10" specifically highlights the most common flaws found in API-driven architectures, such as Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) and Security Misconfiguration, which account for the vast majority of modern API attack attempts.

Salt Security is the pioneer and leader in API security, providing a dedicated platform to secure the entire API ecosystem and the "Agentic AI Action Layer." Salt provides panoramic discovery, proactive posture governance, and intent-based threat protection to help organizations secure their most critical innovations throughout the entire API lifecycle.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a software solution that provides a centralized command center for security operations. It collects and analyzes log data from across an IT estate to help security teams identify patterns of suspicious activity and correlate disparate events into actionable threat intelligence.

Security posture refers to the overall strength and readiness of an organization's collective security state. It encompasses the configuration of digital infrastructure, the efficacy of defensive controls, and the ability to detect, respond to, and recover from threats across the entire enterprise attack surface.

A shadow API is an undocumented or unmanaged endpoint that operates outside the knowledge and oversight of the security team. Often created by developers for quick testing or by third-party integrations, shadow APIs create a "back door" for attackers because they lack the monitoring and protections applied to managed APIs.

Shadow MCP refers to unauthorized or forgotten Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that are deployed without the knowledge of the security team. These servers often exist in private developer repositories or internal prototypes, creating "hidden hands" that can allow AI agents to bypass formal security governance and access sensitive data.