Do Coding Agents Understand Least-Privilege Authorization? C
AI benchmark · Agentic
What is Do Coding Agents Understand Least-Privilege Authorization??
As coding agents gain access to shells, repositories, and user files, least-privilege authorization becomes a prerequisite for safe deployment: an agent should receive enough authority to complete the task, without unnecessary authority that exposes sensitive surfaces. To study whether current models can infer this boundary themselves, we first introduce permission-boundary inference, where a model maps a task instruction and terminal environment to a file-level read/write/execute policy, and AuthBench, a benchmark of 120 realistic terminal tasks with human-reviewed permission labels and executable validators for utility and attack outcomes. AuthBench shows that authorization is not a simple conservative-versus-permissive calibration problem: frontier models often omit permissions required by the execution chain while also granting unused or sensitive accesses. Increasing inference-time reasoning does not resolve this mismatch. Instead, each model moves toward a model-specific authorization attractor: more reasoning makes it more consistent in its own failure mode, whether broad-but-exposed or tight-but-brittle. This suggests that direct policy generation is the bottleneck, because a single generation must both discover all necessary accesses and reject all unnecessary ones. We therefore propose Sufficiency-Tightness Decomposition, which first generates a coverage-oriented policy by forward-simulating the task and then audits each granted entry for grounding and sensitivity. Across tested models, this decomposition improves sensitive-task success by up to 15.8% on tightness-biased models while reducing attack success across all evaluated models.
Tier C
Niche: a handful of models scored, or built by an RL vendor.
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- 11 models scored
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier C
- Adoption: 11 models scored. Tier C.
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- In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
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