Insecure Agents is a podcast that curates the most important conversations and trends in AI security. AI engineers, CISOs, and security practitioners listen to learn how to give their agents the security they need to reach higher levels of capability and autonomy.

Allie Howe

ALLIE HOWE HOST

Allie Howe is a Member of Technical Staff at Keycard and has a background in security engineering. She is a core contributor to the OWASP Agentic Security Initiative and has spoken at AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Agent Security Summit.

𝕏 @vtahowe in /allisonhowe

© 2026 Insecure Agents Podcast / Keycard

Back to episodes
Catherine Jue — Co-Founder and CEO of Kernel
#51 Aug 14

Episode 51 · Aug 14

The Identity Layer Is What's Holding Browser Agents Back: Catherine Jue (Kernel)

Catherine Jue · Co-Founder and CEO of Kernel

--:--

Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel, joins us to explain why browser agents are not blocked by model capability anymore. They are blocked by identity. Kernel builds open source browser infrastructure for AI agents, which means running Chromium in sandboxed Firecracker VMs at scale and solving the part nobody designed for: an agent acting on behalf of a human, on a login page built 20 years ago for a human. Catherine walks through Kernel's Managed Auth product, an SDK that lets developers collect end user credentials so Kernel handles login and re-authentication and the LLM never touches the secret. We get into what agents inherit today (usually the user's full permissions, with no scopes and no audit trail), how ID-JAG and Enterprise Managed Auth for Claude change the picture for MCP servers and what the equivalent looks like for a browser, why multi-hop delegation chains from agent A to agent B to a Kernel browser session have no one-size-fits-all answer, and how intelligent egress networking inside the sandbox can enforce where an agent is allowed to go at the network layer. She closes on the two protocols the early web never standardized, payments and identity, and why Kernel is pushing on the second one.

Listen on