The Black Box You Don’t Have Will Be the Lawsuit You Can’t Win

When Air France 447 crashed into the Atlantic, investigators spent two years searching for the black box. Without it, they had theories. With it, they had truth. The difference? About $100 million in lawsuits and the entire future of fly-by-wire technology.

Your AI agents are flying right now—thousands of them, making millions of decisions, touching critical systems—and you don’t have a black box. When one crashes (not if, when), you’ll have theories about what happened. Your auditors, regulators, and lawyers will want truth.

Good luck explaining that you never bothered to install the recorder.

The Observability Crater in Your Architecture

You’re Tracking the Wrong Things

Your current monitoring is adorable. Really. You’ve got:

• Login logs showing Bob accessed the system at 9:47 AM
• API calls logged with timestamps
• Some CloudWatch metrics that nobody looks at
• A SIEM that generates alerts you ignore

Meanwhile, your agents are playing telephone through five different services, three identity providers, and two cloud regions. By the time an action hits your database, it’s been transformed, delegated, and re-delegated so many times that tracing it back to the origin is like unscrambling an egg.

Traditional IAM logs were built for humans clicking buttons. Your agents are executing complex decision trees at machine speed. It’s like trying to track Formula 1 with a sundial.

The Chain of Invisibility

Here’s what actually happens in your agent workflows:

Step 1 : Human requests action → ✓ Logged
Step 2 : Agent1 receives request → ✗ Maybe logged?
Step 3 : Agent1 delegates to Agent2 → ✗ Definitely not logged
Step 4 : Agent2 calls external API → ✗ Who knows?
Step 5 : API triggers Agent3 → ✗ Lost in the void
Step 6 : Agent3 modifies database → ✓ “Someone” changed data

Congratulations. You know the beginning and end, but the middle? That’s your blind spot. And it’s where all the interesting failures hide.

The Forensic 5 Ws (That You Can’t Answer)

The Questions That Will End Your Career

When something goes catastrophically wrong—and it will—here are the questions you’ll face:

WHO did it?
“Well, it was either Agent_7439, ServiceAccount_Beta, or possibly that temporary agent we spun up for testing. We’re not entirely sure because they all share credentials.”

WHAT did they do?
“They definitely accessed something in production. Could be customer data, could be financial records. The logs just say ‘resource accessed.’”

WHY were they allowed?
“Great question! The permission was granted by… a policy. Somewhere. We think it might have been inherited through delegation, or maybe it was a wildcard scope. We’re investigating.”

HOW did they do it?
“Through some combination of OAuth, token exchange, and what appears to be creative interpretation of our authorization rules. The specifics are… unclear.”

WHEN did it happen?
“Sometime between Monday and Friday. Our logs rotate every 24 hours and we forgot to enable long-term retention.”

If these sound like answers that would get you fired, that’s because they are.

What Real Observability Looks Like

Every transaction needs to be forensically reconstructable:

WHO : Not just the agent ID, but the complete delegation chain back to a human with a name, employee ID, and accountability.

WHAT : The exact resource, down to the field level. Not “database accessed” but “customer.payment_info.credit_card_number viewed.”

WHY : The specific policy, rule, and scope that authorized this exact action. Chapter and verse.

HOW : Complete cryptographic proof—which credential, what protocol, which token exchange, what key was used.

WHEN : Microsecond-precision timestamps synchronized across all systems, with immutable retention.

This isn’t logging. This is forensic accountability.

The Cryptographic Truth Machine

Logs Lie. Cryptography Doesn’t.

Any junior developer can modify a log file. sed -i ‘s/unauthorized/authorized/g’ audit.log and suddenly your breach becomes blessed.

You need Verifiable Action Attestations (VAAs)—cryptographically signed proof that can’t be forged, modified, or denied:

• Every action signed by the executing agent
• Every delegation cryptographically chained
• Every authorization proof preserved
• Every timestamp hash-linked to previous events

When the lawyers come calling, cryptographic proof is the difference between “we think” and “we can prove.”

The Tamper-Proof Trail

Real observability means:

• Immutable logs that can’t be edited after the fact
• Signed attestations that prove who did what
• Hash chains that detect any tampering
• Distributed witnesses so no single point of failure

If your logs can be edited, they’re not logs—they’re suggestions.

Compliance: The Sledgehammer Waiting to Fall

The Regulations You’re Already Violating

GDPR Article 32 : “Ability to ensure ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience”
Translation: If you can’t prove who accessed EU citizen data, that’ll be 4% of global revenue, please.

SOX Section 404 : “Assessment of internal controls”
Translation: If you can’t trace financial transactions end-to-end, enjoy your criminal prosecution.

HIPAA §164.312 : “Record and examine activity in information systems”
Translation: If you can’t show who accessed patient data, here’s your $50,000 per violation per day.

Without agent observability, you’re not just non-compliant. You’re willfully negligent. There’s a legal difference, and it’s measured in zeros on the settlement check.

The Audit That Will Break You

Auditor: “Show us the complete trail for this transaction.”
You: “Here’s where it started and ended.”
Auditor: “What about the middle?”
You: “We have theories…”
Auditor: “That’s a fail.”

No observability means no compliance. No compliance means no business. It’s that simple.

The Sandbox: Your Time Machine for Failure

Record Everything, Replay Anything

The Agentic Sandbox isn’t just for testing—it’s your black box recorder on steroids:

• Every authentication captured and replayable
• Every delegation tracked through the entire chain
• Every decision logged with full context
• Every outcome tied to its origin

When something goes wrong in production, you replay it in the sandbox. Frame by frame. Decision by decision. Until you know exactly what happened and why.

The Scenarios You Must Capture

• The Delegation Disaster : Track how permissions cascade through agent chains
• The Timing Attack : Replay race conditions and concurrent access patterns
• The Permission Drift : Watch how scopes evolve across transactions
• The Invisible Failure : Capture silent errors that don’t throw exceptions

If you can’t replay it, you can’t debug it. If you can’t debug it, you can’t fix it. If you can’t fix it, you can’t defend it in court.

The Three Pillars of Agent Observability

Pillar 1: Complete Coverage

No gaps. No blind spots. No “we don’t log that.” Every action, every decision, every delegation—captured, signed, and stored.

Pillar 2: Cryptographic Integrity

Logs that can’t lie. Attestations that can’t be forged. Proof that stands up in court, not just code review.

Pillar 3: Infinite Replay

The ability to recreate any transaction, any workflow, any failure—exactly as it happened, whenever you need to understand it.

The Bottom Line: Darkness Is Not a Strategy

Operating agents without observability is like flying at night with no instruments. You might get lucky for a while, but eventually, you’ll hit a mountain. And when you do, everyone will ask the same question: “Why didn’t you have a black box?”

The answer “we didn’t think we needed one” won’t satisfy:

• Your CEO explaining the breach to shareholders
• Your legal team defending lawsuits
• Your compliance team failing audits
• Your career prospects after the incident

The Sandbox gives you the black box before you need it. Because the time to install a recorder isn’t after the crash—it’s before the flight.

Aviation learned this lesson with bodies. You can learn it with blogs. Choose wisely.

Ready to illuminate your agent blind spots before regulators force you to? The Maverics Agentic Identity platform includes comprehensive observability and the Agentic Sandbox for complete transaction replay.

Next in the series: “Agent Credential Replay — Why Bearer Tokens Are a Trap”

Because the only thing worse than not knowing what your agents did is knowing but not being able to prove it.

The post Blind spots: Your agents are operating in complete darkness (and so are you) appeared first on Strata.io.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Strata.io authored by Eric Olden. Read the original post at: https://www.strata.io/blog/agentic-identity/agents-are-operating-in-complete-darkness/