Security Considerations for Intent-Based Requests in Agentic Systems

Intent-based requests enable users, applications, and agents to express goals and constraints without specifying step-by-step procedures. Such intents are commonly translated into executable directives and propagated across multiple entities (clients, agents, authorization components, orchestration functions, and execution endpoints). This multi-hop processing expands the attack surface for tampering, privilege escalation, constraint bypass, and intent drift. This document provides a solution-agnostic security analysis for intent-based requests across agentic systems. It introduces a reference model and scenarios to guide protocol and system design, and also presents threats and requirements. The document emphasizes constraint validation, invocation validation, multi-hop chain-of- custody, and policy-driven responses to drift, while remaining independent of any specific deployment domain.