Reimagining Security and Trust for the Agentic Era with Cisco

Kevin Kennedy of Cisco opened the company’s Security Field Day 16 presentation by framing security and trust for the agentic era. He outlined Cisco’s security imperatives for an AI-armed threat landscape, introduced eBPF-based vulnerability shielding with Live Protect, and explained how agentic AI is reshaping SASE requirements and driving the convergence of security and observability in the SOC. Kennedy, who later handed off to Ant Ducker for a deeper dive, framed the era around two questions: whether organizations can defend against adversaries armed with AI, and whether they can trust their own agents to work securely.

Kennedy illustrated the stakes with a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug that a $50 Mythos run turned into a single-packet crash. He argued that time to exploit has gone negative. AWS saw honeypot exploit attempts against the recent PHP vulnerability four days before the fix shipped. About 15 percent of packages on a common repository still had vulnerable versions four years after Log4j. Customers adopt Cisco’s hardening releases at single-digit rates, so Cisco built Live Protect. It uses eBPF technology from Cisco’s Isovalent acquisition to apply kernel-level, signature-based shields that block exploit paths without reboots or meaningful performance impact. Talos validates and releases the shields, which are included in standard licenses and will cover Cisco’s core products by year end.

Kennedy said Cisco is working to extend shielding to customer workloads, where agents interacting with eBPF find better compensating controls than human-written policy. He also argued that agents will transform SASE. In a survey of roughly 1,000 enterprises, 99 percent called SASE important or critical to agentic AI, and Cisco expects enterprise traffic to more than double within 24 months. Because agents face no consequences for misbehaving, zero trust must shift from access control to action control, enforced inline through agent gateways. Finally, he said the SOC cannot tell whether an agent deleting 10,000 files is compromised, rogue, or working as intended without observability data. That is why Cisco is bringing security and observability together on one data fabric.