The End of Trust: How Agentic AI Breaks Security Assumptions

arXiv:2605.16436v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For decades, the security of digital interaction has rested on an unacknowledged economic constraint. Attackers faced a tradeoff between the fidelity of a deception and the scale at which it could be deployed. Convincing impersonation required sustained human effort and was confined to a narrow set of high-value targets, while mass-market attacks sacrificed plausibility for reach. Detection systems, verification mechanisms, and user awareness training have all been implicitly calibrated to the artifacts of cheap deception that this tradeoff produced. Agentic AI collapses the tradeoff, allowing high-fidelity, individually tailored deception to be produced at mass-market scale. We argue that this shift exhausts a security paradigm rather than merely intensifying the threat landscape. We introduce the Infinite Impostor, an attack model in which an autonomous agent interposes itself between two parties who already trust each other, hijacking an existing relationship rather than building a new one from scratch. Detection-oriented defenses share an assumption that generative progress is eliminating, that synthetic outputs are distinguishable from authentic ones. We propose a suspect-by-default paradigm that shifts security from authenticating actors to evaluating actions, and examine the governance tensions that arise when platforms become the regulatory substrate of digital interaction.

Abstract:For decades, the security of digital interaction has rested on an unacknowledged economic constraint. Attackers faced a tradeoff between the fidelity of a deception and the scale at which it could be deployed. Convincing impersonation required sustained human effort and was confined to a narrow set of high-value targets, while mass-market attacks sacrificed plausibility for reach. Detection systems, verification mechanisms, and user awareness training have all been implicitly calibrated to the artifacts of cheap deception that this tradeoff produced. Agentic AI collapses the tradeoff, allowing high-fidelity, individually tailored deception to be produced at mass-market scale. We argue that this shift exhausts a security paradigm rather than merely intensifying the threat landscape. We introduce the Infinite Impostor, an attack model in which an autonomous agent interposes itself between two parties who already trust each other, hijacking an existing relationship rather than building a new one from scratch. Detection-oriented defenses share an assumption that generative progress is eliminating, that synthetic outputs are distinguishable from authentic ones. We propose a suspect-by-default paradigm that shifts security from authenticating actors to evaluating actions, and examine the governance tensions that arise when platforms become the regulatory substrate of digital interaction.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.16436 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2605.16436v2 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16436 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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The End of Trust: How Agentic AI Breaks Security Assumptions

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