LLM06: Excessive Agency - Quick Reference

📋 What Is It?

Excessive Agency is the harm that follows when an LLM system is granted too much ability to act - too many tools, too much permission, or too much autonomy - so that an unexpected, ambiguous, or adversarially manipulated model output triggers a damaging real-world action: an email sent, a row deleted, a payment made. Once a model is wired to tools, its words become actions. It is a design and architecture flaw in the agentic scaffolding, not a flaw inside the model weights - a perfectly benign model can still cause catastrophic damage.

LLM06 OWASP Rank 2025

3 Roots Functionality · Permissions · Autonomy

Agentic Tools · Plugins · Multi-agent

🌱 The Three Roots

Excessive Functionality: the agent can reach tools/capabilities it does not need - every extra tool is extra attack surface.
Excessive Permissions: tools are scoped far broader than the task (UPDATE/DELETE/DROP when SELECT would do; shared high-privilege service accounts).
Excessive Autonomy: high-impact, irreversible actions execute with no human confirmation or independent authz check.

⚠️ Top Attack Vectors

Indirect prompt injection → tool abuse: instructions hidden in a page/doc/email the agent reads hijack its tools.
Ambiguous output → destructive op: "clean up duplicates" resolves to delete(filter="*").
Tool chaining & cascade: search → read secret → HTTP exfiltrate; each call "allowed", the composition is the exploit.
Over-scoped tools: a "lookup" tool that runs free-form SQL reaches any table.
Confused deputy / shared creds: agent acts as one privileged identity; per-user authz evaporates.
Argument injection: attacker text flows into a path, shell fragment, or URL (SSRF).

🔴 Attack Flow

1. Attacker plants text in content the agent reads (page/doc/email/tool result)
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2. Text enters the model's context (LLM01 trigger)
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3. Model emits tool_call{ delete_user, {id: 42} }
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4. No scope check? No approval gate? No downstream authz?
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5. IMPACT: Real, often irreversible action executes!

❌ Vulnerable Code

# A "lookup" tool that is really arbitrary SQL over an admin connection
conn = psycopg2.connect("postgres://admin:secret@db/app")  # full-privilege

@tool
def query_database(sql: str) -> str:
    """Run a SQL query to answer the user's question."""
    with conn.cursor() as cur:
        cur.execute(sql)          # ← ANY statement: SELECT, UPDATE, DROP…
        return str(cur.fetchall())

# Injected input → query_database("DELETE FROM orders")  irreversible, no gate
                

✅ Secure Code

# One narrow capability, read-only role, parameterised, bounded
ro_conn = psycopg2.connect("postgres://agent_ro:pw@db/app")  # SELECT only

class OrderStatusArgs(BaseModel):
    order_id: int = Field(gt=0)   # typed, validated - not free text

@tool(args_schema=OrderStatusArgs)
def get_order_status(order_id: int) -> str:
    with ro_conn.cursor() as cur:
        cur.execute(
            "SELECT status FROM orders WHERE id = %s LIMIT 1",  # parameterised
            (order_id,),
        )
        row = cur.fetchone()
    return row[0] if row else "not found"
# No other tables, no writes, no arbitrary SQL - the vector is gone.
                

✓ Prevention Checklist

Minimise functionality - explicit, reviewed tool allow-list; no debug/left-over tools
Least-privilege scope each tool (read vs write vs delete)
Propagate the end-user's identity; no shared admin creds
Enforce authorisation downstream, in code - not the model's say-so
Human-in-the-loop for high-impact / irreversible actions
Complete mediation: every call through one central policy gate
Validate/constrain arguments; no model text to shell, eval, or raw SQL
Rate-limit, budget, sandbox to bound the blast radius
Fail safe (default-deny, stop and ask); prefer reversible ops
Log every invocation with the real user; alert on anomalies

🧰 Tools & Takeaway

Pydantic Zod OAuth scopes Least-priv DB roles Approval gate Egress allow-list Audit log

💡 Takeaway: The model proposes, code disposes. Authorisation must live outside the model, at the tool boundary - the security question is never "did the model say the right thing?" but "should THIS call, with THESE args, in THIS context, run at all?"

⚠️ Compounds with: LLM01 Prompt Injection (the trigger) and LLM05 Improper Output Handling (the hand-off). Fixing one without the others leaves the system exposed.

🤖 Excessive AgencyLLM06