The Vulnerability With No CVE: Managing Persistent Gaps Between Mandate and Authority in AI Coding Agents

Abstract:Existing guidance identifies excessive agency, excessive permission, weak task-bound authorization, and inadequate agent controls as important risks. Control frameworks also describe capabilities for constraining, authorizing, observing, validating, and responding to agent activity. Yet security programs still need a way to manage persistent deployed instances that span components and outlive any one event. We propose the agentic posture vulnerability (APV) as a task-conditioned vulnerability-management abstraction: a durable record for a composed agent-control exposure. One posture may produce different runtime manifestations across tasks; APV links those manifestations to the invariant posture and remains open until authority is narrowed, a missing control is added, risk is accepted, or closure is verified. APV is not proposed as a new root-cause class of risk; it operationalizes existing excessive-agency, authorization, and control-composition weaknesses. We distinguish APVs from CVE-addressable product defects, OWASP Excessive Agency, Agent Baseline control outcomes, and the runtime authorization-execution gap. We then provide a field vignette, a thresholded definition, six recurring APV patterns, a vulnerability lifecycle, a minimum record, a control-and-closure matrix, tooling implications, and a testable research agenda.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.05884 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2608.05884v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.05884 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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