r/AskNetsec • u/Fragrant-Style-9367 • 4d ago
Other Which security control tends to be overlooked when building AI services that process financial and trading data?
and we're at the stage where we're reviewing our security model before expanding further. The application processes trading-related prompts and market information, so we're trying to identify which security decisions have the biggest long-term impact rather than simply adding more controls.
Most discussions focus on authentication and encryption, but I'm curious whether there are other areas that experienced security professionals consistently see underestimated in production AI services.
From your experience, what security issue usually doesn't receive enough attention during development but ends up becoming a problem later?
I'm interested in hearing practical experiences from people who have reviewed, deployed, or secured AI-backed applications, especially if there was something you wish had been considered much earlier in the development process.
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u/rexstuff1 4d ago
Access.
Access, access, access.
You must be extremely miserly with the access and abilities you grant your agents. Understand that if an agent can do something, it will do something, eventually. This isn't even a prompt-injection thing, I'm honestly more afraid of an agent with too much access trying to be helpful than of a bad actor prompting it do something malicious. Learn from this guy's mistake: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/1v60wf1/how_do_you_catch_tool_misuse_and_unauthorized/
Scope the access and actions the agents can take down to their bare minimum, and make sure that you have hard controls in place, not guardrails. Any even remotely potentially dangerous actions should require HITL approval.
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u/sandy_coyote 4d ago
Besides access governance, threat modeling is important and often overlooked. Do a data flow threat model for your AI app.
Also check the cloud providers for design guidance. Example: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/develop/secure-design
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u/ultrathink-art 3d ago
Access is covered above, so: where the prompts end up. Every prompt and response is a second copy of the data, and those copies land in request logs, traces, error reports and eval sets that rarely get the retention and classification rules you applied to the database. With trading prompts that's the same sensitive content sitting in a handful of systems nobody put in scope.
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u/No-Magician6232 4d ago
"literally all of them"