Article
Intel + Mirror Security: Securing Autonomous AI with Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Executive Summary
Intel and Mirror Security have collaborated to address the growing security challenges posed by autonomous AI agents. By combining Intel® Tiber™ Trust Authority independent attestation services with Mirror’s comprehensive AI security platform, organizations can now deploy autonomous AI agents with cryptographically verifiable increased security. This integration creates a robust security architecture that helps protect data not just at rest and in transit, but crucially during processing, when autonomous agents make critical decisions. The collaboration delivers verifiable agent behavior, increasingly secure execution environments, enforced action boundaries, and auditable decision trails—all essential for deploying trustworthy AI agents in regulated industries and sensitive domains.
Introduction
As artificial intelligence transitions from passive models to active autonomous agents, the security landscape faces unprecedented challenges. Today’s AI agents can initiate actions independently, make complex decisions, and collaborate with other systems—all of which introduce novel security concerns that traditional approaches cannot adequately address.
This collaboration between Intel and Mirror Security represents a significant advancement in autonomous agent security by creating a technical foundation for trustworthy AI. By integrating Intel’s hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) attestation capabilities with Mirror’s specialized AI security tools - behavior guardrails and fully homomorphic encryption —organizations can now build AI agents that operate with appropriate autonomy while providing cryptographic proof of their adherence to predefined boundaries.
"The fundamental security challenge with autonomous agents is that they're constantly making decisions in dynamic environments," explains Pankaj Thapa, CEO of Mirror Security. "Traditional security controls are like locking the doors to a building, but with autonomous agents, you need to ensure that the occupants inside the building are following the rules as they move around freely. Mirror’s behavior guardrails & encrypted AI artifacts combined with Intel's hardware-based attestation creates a verifiable security approach that enables autonomy while maintaining security boundaries."
The Challenge: Securing Autonomous AI Agents
Autonomous AI agents present security challenges fundamentally different from traditional AI systems:
Independent Action: Unlike passive AI models that simply respond to queries, autonomous agents can initiate actions in digital and physical environments.
Decision Autonomy: Agents make independent decisions based on complex criteria, creating unpredictable behavior patterns difficult to secure with static permissions.
Multi-Agent Complexity: When agents collaborate, their interactions create emergent behaviors that introduce novel security concerns.
Authority Delegation: As organizations delegate increasing authority to agents, securing the boundaries of that authority becomes critical.
Privilege Escalation Risk: Compromised agents could potentially access unauthorized resources or exceed their intended operational boundaries.
Traditional security approaches fall short when applied to autonomous agents. Static permissions, network boundaries, and conventional access controls cannot adequately constrain the dynamic nature of agent behavior. What’s needed is a security approach that provides protection and verification throughout the entire agent lifecycle—especially during the critical processing phase when agents make decisions and take actions.
"As AI evolves from passive models to autonomous agents, we need security architectures that go beyond static permissions,” said Purnam Sheth, VP/GM Trust and Security Products at Intel. "Our collaboration with Mirror Security creates a comprehensive solution designed to protect AI systems at their most vulnerable point—during processing, when critical decisions are being made. Intel Tiber Trust Authority and Confidential Computing help provide the foundation for Autonomous AI that customers can trust."
The Combined Solution: Intel Tiber Trust Authority + Mirror Security Platform
The collaboration integrates two complementary technology stacks to create a comprehensive security foundation for autonomous AI agents:
Intel’s Contribution: TEEs Authenticated by Intel Tiber Trust Authority
Intel provides the hardware-based security foundation through:
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs): Offering both application isolation with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) and virtual machine (VM) isolation with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX), Intel Confidential Computing solutions offer the flexibility to set the appropriate trust boundary for your workloads.
Intel Tiber Trust Authority: Independent attestation services designed to verify TEE authenticity and integrity, providing cryptographic proof that agent code is running in a genuine, uncompromised secure environment.
Mirror Security’s Contribution
Mirror Security delivers a specialized AI security platform:
Provides application-level security through behavior and policy guardrails, ensuring agent actions comply with predefined boundaries and preventing unauthorized operations. The engine continuously monitors system interactions and enforces security policies in real-time, with particular attention to AI-specific workflows and vector operations.
Delivers data-level security through AI-specific encryption techniques that protect data while still enabling AI operations.
This includes:
Similarity-preserving encryption specifically designed for secure embedding storage and metadata.
Hybrid homomorphic encryption for secure similarity computations.
AI-centric access/attribute control tightly integrated with AI operations.
Protection against specific threats including embedding reconstruction, similarity attacks, and model extraction.
Together, these technologies create a multi-layered security architecture that addresses the unique challenges of autonomous agents enabling
the governance layer through policy definition and enforcement.
the data protection layer through AI-optimized encryption.
the verification layer through attestation.
the execution security layer through hardware isolation.
High-Level Security Architecture
The integrated security architecture creates an end-to-end protection system for autonomous agents:
Secure Agent Deployment
The autonomous agent application, including the Mirror SDK, is packaged and deployed within an Intel Confidential Computing TEE. This creates an encrypted and hardware-isolated environment designed to protect the agent’s code and data from the rest of the system—even from privileged users or cloud providers.
Attestation and Verification
Once deployed, the agent environment generates an attestation quote (cryptographic measurement of its state) provided by Intel Tiber Trust Authority. This verification confirms:
The agent is running on genuine Intel hardware with up-to-date security patches.
The agent’s code matches the expected Mirror SDK and application code.
The TEE environment meets all security requirements.
Mirror’s security services are correctly loaded and uncompromised.
Secure Capability Provisioning
Upon successful attestation, the system safely provisions the agent with necessary capabilities:
Mirror Keys: Encryption keys for accessing protected data.
Mirror AI Security Policies: Defined boundaries for agent actions and decisions.
API Credentials: Secure access to required external services.
Decision Authority: Clearly defined operational boundaries.
Critically, these capabilities are only delivered after attestation confirms the environment’s integrity.
Runtime Security Enforcement
During operation, multiple security layers protect the agent:
Mirror Policy Engine enforces defined guardrails on agent behavior.
Mirror handles encryption/decryption of sensitive data in use
Intel Confidential Computing processes data within a hardware-isolated TEE.
Mirror SDK integrates these components and provides a unified security API.
Crucially, all Mirror operations—including policy enforcement, encryption/decryption, and access control decisions—are conducted within the attested environment. This means that every security operation performed by Mirror’s components is verified by Intel Tiber Trust Authority, ensuring that the security mechanisms themselves cannot be tampered with or bypassed.
Verifiable Action Logging
All significant agent actions are cryptographically signed and logged, creating an immutable audit trail that:
Links each action to the attested environment where it occurred.
Provides cryptographic proof that actions complied with defined policies.
Creates accountability for autonomous agent behavior.
This architecture ensures protection at every phase of agent operation—at rest, in transit, and crucially, during processing when decisions are being made.
Security Benefits and Compliance
The partnership delivers several critical security benefits for organizations deploying autonomous AI agents:
Verifiable Agent Behavior
Organizations can cryptographically verify that agent behavior complies with defined policies and boundaries. This provides proof that:
Agents accessed only authorized data.
Agent decisions followed approved reasoning processes.
Agent actions remained within permitted boundaries through behavior guardrails.
Agent integrations with other systems were secured.
Secure Multi-Agent Collaboration
The integrated solution enables secure collaboration between autonomous agents while maintaining security boundaries:
Agents can delegate tasks to other agents with verifiable authority limits.
Inter-agent communications are protected and attested.
Collaboration patterns can be cryptographically verified.
Trust boundaries between agents are clearly established and enforced.
All Mirror security operations are attested, providing cryptographic proof that security controls are functioning correctly.
Data Protection with AI Functionality
Mirror specialized encryption enables AI operations on protected data:
Hybrid homomorphic encryption enables AI operations on encrypted data.
Allows searches while data remains encrypted, protecting against vector similarity attacks and embedding reconstruction.
Format-preserving encryption maintains data structure while protecting content.
AI-centric Attribute/Role-Based Access Control (A/RBAC) provides granular permissions for embedding operations, model inference, and vector manipulation.
End-to-end encryption protects data at-rest, in-transit, and critically, in-use during AI processing.
Policy-Based Governance
Mirror provides comprehensive policy controls for autonomous agents:
Runtime inspection of AI inputs and outputs prevents policy violations.
Behavior guardrails ensure agents operate within predefined boundaries.
Built-in rules for PII protection, prompt safety, and RAG security.
Simple policy definition language enables clear governance.
Comprehensive Audit Capabilities and Compliance
The solution creates detailed, verifiable records of agent operations:
Cryptographically signed logs of all significant agent actions.
Attestation evidence linked to each agent decision.
Complete traceability of data access and processing.
Compliance mapping to regulatory frameworks. The combined security architecture directly supports compliance requirements for GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and other regulations through:
End-to-end encryption of data at-rest, in-transit, and in-use.
Detailed logging and monitoring for simplified compliance audits.
Unified attribute/role-based access control across database and AI operations.
Comprehensive protection against both traditional and vector-specific threats.
Conclusion: The Future of Secure Autonomous AI
The collaboration between Intel and Mirror Security represents a significant advancement in autonomous agent security. By integrating hardware-based security foundations with specialized AI security tools, we’re enabling organizations to deploy autonomous agents that can operate with appropriate independence while providing cryptographic proof of their adherence to security boundaries.
As AI evolves from passive models to active agents, security must evolve as well. Static permissions and conventional security approaches cannot address the dynamic nature of autonomous systems. This solution is designed to address the comprehensive security architecture needed for the AI era—protection at rest, in transit, and most crucially, during processing.
Organizations can now implement a wide range of advanced security use cases that were previously difficult or impossible to achieve. From attested policy enforcement and PII protection to secure multi-party computation and trusted information ecosystems, the collaboration opens new possibilities for secure AI deployment.
"This collaboration represents more than just a technology integration—it's a blueprint for the responsible deployment of autonomous AI, " said Steven Darrah, GM Enterprise Solution Sales for North Ameria at Intel. "As organizations increasingly rely on AI to make critical decisions, having cryptographic proof of secure, bounded operations provides the foundation of trust needed for widespread adoption."
Dr. Aditya Narayana K, Co-Founder of Mirror Security adds, "We're building the security infrastructure for an AI-powered future where autonomous agents become a standard part of enterprise operations. By combining Intel's hardware security with our platform capabilities, we're enabling organizations to harness the full potential of autonomous AI while maintaining the security boundaries that regulated industries demand."
For organizations in regulated industries or those handling sensitive data, this collaboration delivers the technical foundation needed to confidently deploy autonomous agents. With verifiable behavior, protected execution, enforced boundaries, and comprehensive audit trails, organizations can now harness the power of autonomous AI while maintaining the security and compliance their operations demand.
As we look toward a future where AI agents increasingly shape our digital and physical world, ensuring their security is not optional—it’s essential. The Intel and Mirror Security collaboration provides the architecture needed to make this secure future possible.
