From Neural Intent to Cryptographic Authorization: Securing AI-Driven Enterprise Workflows

Abstract

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workflows is transforming high-consequence government and enterprise systems into language-based, tool-using and increasingly autonomous infrastructures. While these workflows can delegate planning autonomously, security-critical execution should be strictly mediated. Conventional identity management services authenticate who may invoke a primitive, but remain agnostic to which workflow steps are authorized at runtime. An AI-driven workflow can still be hijacked by injection attacks into executing malicious actions that satisfy identity checks yet violate user intent. We propose Neural Cryptographic Services (NCS), a neuro-symbolic security enforcement plane interposed between neural planners and privileged tools. NCS decouples cognitive planning from execution authority: an untrusted neural planner drafts structured plans, while a deterministic symbolic controller gates execution using an offline-signed, hash-chained instruction stream. Specifically, NCS validates cryptographic signatures and hash chains incrementally, releasing a single instruction template at a time, and admitting a tool call only when its proposed parameters satisfy the constraints of the signed template. Out-of-order or altered tool calls fail-closed, and state transitions are logged for post-hoc auditing. NCS does not attempt to prevent neural planner compromise under injection; it guarantees that a compromised planner cannot dispatch actions outside the authorization. We evaluate NCS using AgentDojo, a custom argument-hijacking dataset, adaptive adversarial instructions, and TheAgentCompany. NCS drives attack success rates to near zero while preserving acceptable utility on benign workflows.