From Pets To Cattle To Agents: Evolving Identity And Security For Workloads - Dwayne McDaniel

BSides San Antonio 2026 June 13 at St. Mary's University “Treat servers like cattle, not pets” captured one of the biggest shifts in how we run infrastructure. Now, AI agents are forcing another mental shift, as we anthropomorphize these nondeterministic autonomous processes. How do we handle delegation, security, and identity for these agentic systems? This talk will look at the state of authentication and authorization across services today, how we got here, and look into why human and non-human identity management diverged.