Prompt injection attacks drive Red Hat and Nvidia’s OpenShell

Prompt injection attacks and silent data exfiltration have turned AI agent security from a theoretical worry into an urgent enterprise concern.

As agents move from developer laptops into data centers, companies need guardrails that don’t strip away what makes agents useful. Red Hat Inc. and Nvidia Corp. have expanded their partnership to tackle that problem through OpenShell, an open-source project that sets limits on what agents can do. The threat model for agents differs sharply from that of traditional software, so the industry has to build a shared standard to secure them, according to Derek Carr (pictured, left), senior distinguished engineer at Red Hat.

“Agents can’t get access to your secrets. They need deny-by-default networking, and you need a rich policy framework for what happened and when for this class of apps,” Carr said. “Nvidia had reached out to us and noted that they were seeing the same problem domain. No one wants to work on this alone. It’s better to work together.”

Carr and Mrunal Patel (right), distinguished engineer at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how OpenShell helps enterprises run AI agents in production with safeguards against prompt injection and data leaks. (* Disclosure below.)

Prompt injection attacks force a new agent security model

Viral projects such as OpenClaw showed the industry that agents could take real actions on their own. Of course, that power also bred anxiety about agents leaking secrets or spending company money, with concrete warning signs appearing early, Patel noted.

“As soon as we started hearing about the prompt injection attacks and how like folks were seeing the data getting exfiltrated outside, that was scary,” Patel said. “We realized we needed a solution.”

To that end, OpenShell lets operators give agents access to specific endpoints while keeping credentials hidden from the agents and scoped to those endpoints, according to Carr. A policy advisor asks agents to justify blocked actions in plain language, while operators can update policies as workloads change. With OpenShell now under open governance at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation following Nvidia’s contribution, Red Hat aims to make deploying agents on OpenShift as routine as running traditional apps, with prompt injection defenses built into the platform.

“Many companies are struggling to get to one agent in production, let alone thousands or millions,” Carr said. “By having a project like OpenShell in the ecosystem, it provides a blueprint for companies to follow — to get from their first idea of ‘I want to do something with agents’ to a point where they’re safely doing one, 10 or 20 in production.”

Stay tuned for the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA.

(* Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE