Palanivel Manoharan

Description:

From booking flights to managing cloud servers, autonomous AI agents are no longer just generating text—they are taking actions. But granting AI direct access to databases and microservices introduces severe identity and authorization vulnerabilities that traditional firewalls and passwords cannot stop. Join IEEE Senior Member and enterprise cybersecurity architect Palanivel (Mano) Manoharan for a deep dive into the emerging world of Non-Human Identities (NHIs) and Agentic AI security. Discover how autonomous workflows are breaking legacy cybersecurity boundaries and explore the cutting-edge Zero Trust architectures engineering teams use to defend against them.

What Students Will Learn (Key Takeaways):
The Architecture of Autonomous Vulnerability: Why granting static API keys and service accounts to Large Language Models creates ambient authority ("God Mode"), and how indirect prompt injection exploits unmonitored tool calls.

The Shift from Human to Machine Identity: How Non-Human Identities (NHIs) dominate enterprise cloud traffic, and why traditional authentication (passwords, MFA, SSO) is fundamentally obsolete for machine-to-machine, multi-agent systems.

Decoupled Runtime Authorization in Practice: The mechanics of inspecting actions, not just identities, using Policy-as-Code (PaC) and external Policy Decision Points (like Open Policy Agent and Cedar) in the Layer 7 data plane.

Zero Trust Engineering for AI Systems: How cryptographically verifiable workloads (SPIFFE/SPIRE) and ephemeral, intent-decaying tokens neutralize unauthorized lateral movement across cloud environments.

The AI Security Career Landscape: The specific systems engineering, cryptography, and cloud security skills students must develop to lead the high-demand convergence of AI engineering and enterprise cybersecurity.

Biography: