Grimlock: Guarding High-Agency Systems with eBPF and Attested Channels

--> Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2605.27488 (cs) [Submitted on 26 May 2026] Title: Grimlock: Guarding High-Agency Systems with eBPF and Attested Channels Authors: Qiancheng Wu , Wenhui Zhang , Gan Fang , Sheng Mao , Biao Gao , David Levitsky , Shawna Murphy Butterworth , Rob Cameron View a PDF of the paper titled Grimlock: Guarding High-Agency Systems with eBPF and Attested Channels, by Qiancheng Wu and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Agentic systems increasingly run user-authored orchestration code that invokes tools, spawns subtasks, and delegates work across machines and clouds. Although this high agency is productive, it creates a security problem: identity, authorization, provenance, and delegation are often pushed into application code, where they become difficult to enforce consistently and difficult to audit. We present \emph{Grimlock}, an \emph{Agent Guard} that restores separation of concerns by moving trust enforcement into the sandbox substrate while leaving agent code unchanged. Grimlock uses \emph{eBPF-enforced traffic interception} to ensure that sandbox communication passes through a guard, and combines it with \emph{post-handshake attestation} bound to standard TLS~1.3 channel bindings. After a channel is established, the guard authorizes communication and mints short-lived, channel-bound \emph{scope tokens} that capture least-privilege delegation. At the receiving side, the destination guard re-validates identity, scope, and channel binding, terminates TLS, and releases plaintext to the destination sandbox only after policy checks succeed. kTLS provides an efficient dataplane for protected communication. As a result, Grimlock offers a path toward transparent, auditable, and scope-bound agent-to-agent communication across heterogeneous multi-cloud environments, using commodity Linux primitives and without requiring changes to user-layer orchestration code. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.27488 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2605.27488v1 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27488 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Wenhui Zhang [ view email ] [v1] Tue, 26 May 2026 15:53:33 UTC (108 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Grimlock: Guarding High-Agency Systems with eBPF and Attested Channels, by Qiancheng Wu and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? )