Apr 27, 2026 · cs.CRJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Xiaohang Yu, Hejia Geng, Xinmeng Zeng, William Knottenbelt
Imperial College London · University of Oxford · Stanford University
Agentic systems increasingly act with user secrets for APIs, messaging platforms, and cloud services. Today's agent runtimes typically implement authorization by exposure: enabling action often means placing a reusable secret, or a reusable artifact derived from it, inside the runtime, so a transient prompt-injection or tool-side compromise becomes durable account compromise. Existing defenses cover adjacent pieces such as secret storage, scoped delegation, sender-constrained tokens, and runtime monitoring, but leave the combined agentic obligation without a common specification: an untrusted autonomous requester should be able to cause a user-authorized secret-backed operation without gaining reusable authority over it. We formalize this as the Agent Secret Use (ASU) problem and identify seven security properties any solution must satisfy, spanning authorization integrity and secret confidentiality. We propose the Secret-Use Delegation Protocol (SUDP), in which a requester proposes a canonical operation, the user authorizes it with a fresh authenticator-backed grant, and a custodian redeems the grant to perform the bounded use; reusable authority never crosses the requester boundary. We specialize SUDP for LLM-driven agents, where it applies whenever a tool call would exercise user-enrolled authority-bearing material. Under standard cryptographic assumptions, SUDP satisfies all seven properties when integrated with a hardware-rooted runtime. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/xhyumiracle/sudp.