# Hybrid Inspection and Task-Based Access Control in Zero-Trust Agentic AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07982/) (2025)
- [MetaTool Benchmark for Large Language Models: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03128/) (2023)
- [TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04550/) (2025)
- [Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05782/) (2021)
- [Intent Detection in the Age of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01627/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Agentic AI and Cybersecurity: Challenges, Opportunities and Use-case Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05293/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10355/) (2026)
- [MCPAgentBench: A Real-world Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agent MCP Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24565/) (2025)
- [From Failure to Mastery: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01498/) (2026)
- [Delegated Authorization for Agents Constrained to Semantic Task-to-Scope Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26702/) (2025)
- [A new approach for fine-tuning sentence transformers for intent classification and out-of-scope detection tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13649/) (2024)
- [TopoCurate:Modeling Interaction Topology for Tool-Use Agent Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01714/) (2026)
- [Tool-Genesis: A Task-Driven Tool Creation Benchmark for Self-Evolving Language Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05578/) (2026)
- [Access Controlled Website Interaction for Agentic AI with Delegated Critical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18197/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Toward SLM-based agentic task-tool intent matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03213/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Authorizing Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents to dynamically invoke tools and access protected resources introduces significant security risks, and the risks grow dramatically as agents engage in multi-turn conversations and scale toward distributed collaboration. A compromised or malicious agentic application can tamper with tool calls, falsify results, or request permissions beyond the scope of the subject's intended tasks, which could go unnoticed with current delegated authorization flows given their lack of visibility into the original subject's intent. In light of this, we make the following contributions towards Continuous Agent Semantic Authorization (CASA). First, we propose a hybrid runtime enforcement model that combines deterministic and semantic controls enabled by a zero-trust interception layer. Five deterministic controls enforce structural and data-integrity guarantees over the message flow, while a semantic inspection layer evaluates whether tool call choices align with the intended tasks commissioned to the agent. Second, differently from prior Task-Based Access Control (TBAC) techniques that operate on single-turn interactions, we decompose the semantic layer into two stages: i) a task-extraction step that distills the subject's objectives from multi-turn conversations at the interception layer, and ii) a task-tool semantic matching step at the authorization server that evaluates whether the requested tools are appropriate for the extracted tasks. Third, we extend the ASTRA dataset that we introduced in a prior work, by generating novel conversation-tool datasets with multi-turn interactions containing relevant and irrelevant tool calls for a given task. Lastly, we provide the first experimental results for TBAC under multi-turn conversations.
