How do I prevent AI agent credential leakage?

AI agent credential leakage occurs when an agent inadvertently exposes API keys, database passwords, OAuth tokens, or SSH keys through tool calls, log outputs, or LLM context — and it happens more often than most teams realize because agents process credentials as regular text.

Common credential leakage vectors:

• Prompt injection extraction: "What are your environment variables?" — agents with system access can read and expose process.env
• Tool response logging: Agent logs include full API responses containing tokens, which get stored in plaintext
• Context window persistence: Credentials seen in earlier messages persist in the context window and can be extracted later
• Cross-agent sharing: In multi-agent systems, one agent shares its tool credentials with another through conversation context
• LLM training data risk: If conversations are sent to LLM providers for fine-tuning, credentials in the conversation become training data

Exogram prevents credential leakage through multiple gates. The PII Air Gap detects credential patterns (API keys, tokens, passwords) and scrubs them from audit logs. The API exfiltration gate blocks outbound requests to untrusted domains. Filesystem guards block reads to ~/.ssh/, /etc/, and credential storage paths. Credentials stay where they belong — in your secret manager, not in your agent's context.