THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY: THE AGENT-TOOL TRUST BOUNDARY

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Modern AI agents often treat model outputs as fully trusted inputs to tools, creating a dangerous gap between text strings (the map) and what the underlying system actually does (the territory). Attackers exploit this by encoding malicious behavior in paths, URLs, or shell commands that pass superficial checks but resolve to sensitive files, internal services, or injected commands at execution time. Robust defenses require layered, deterministic guards: semantic validation that interprets arguments as the system will, and execution-time checks that verify real filesystem and network behavior rather than relying on regexes or human confirmation alone.