Tethered: Our Agents Are Us — Shu Fang, Two Sigma
Two Sigma implemented a framework allowing every employee to run cloud agents using their own unique user identity, addressing the challenges of permissions drift and maintaining security in a highly regulated environment. The solution leverages existing Kubernetes infrastructure (dedicated namespaces per person) and introduces two critical guardrails: propagating a trace header for full action provenance, and utilizing Google's web grounding for enterprise—a restricted search index that eliminates external egress vulnerabilities while accepting a data freshness constraint of up to 24 hours.
Key takeaways
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Running Agents as User Identity
2:00
By running agents with the user's exact identity, the system bypasses conventional constraints like permissions drift and licensing issues associated with separate machine identities. This capability was supported by pre-existing infrastructure: a Kubernetes namespace per individual in every region, where automated jobs already ran using the user's identity via a sidecar mounting mechanism.
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Ensuring Action Provenance (Attribution)
8:37
To differentiate between actions taken by the human and those performed by the agent, a dedicated header is propagated throughout the system. This trace ID allows for full provenance tracking, enabling the replay of the entire chain of actions leading to an end result, which is superior to simple identity verification.
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Securing Web Access with Grounding
9:18
To mitigate risks like exfiltration and prompt injection from open web access, the firm adopted Google's 'web grounding for enterprise.' This service provides search and fetch capabilities within the internal VPC network boundary, while blocking native tools (e.g., Brave web browser) to ensure all requests route through the controlled index.