Tide's emergent authority model aims to eliminate the central security target

Tide's latest MCP server enables coding agents to incorporate security mechanisms grounded in authority that materializes exclusively when identity, policy, context, and intent converge. Michael Loewy, co-founder of the Tide Foundation, contends that cybersecurity was already falling behind attackers well before artificial intelligence entered the picture. A single typo or a sophisticated nation-state actor could both potentially trigger a security incident.

Loewy elaborates on the asymmetry of security requirements: "Before AI even came into the developer consciousness, a developer or a platform owner needed to be perfect all the time — perfectly patched, free of errors, free of bugs — and an attacker only needed to be right once to get in. It's virtually impossible, which is why we're seeing breaches in the news every day, and the biggest companies in the world getting breached. It could be one poorly written line of code, one misconfiguration, and then you're done."

The emergence of AI has intensified these vulnerabilities considerably. Loewy points out that enormous quantities of inadequately scrutinized, bug-laden code are being generated at the same moment that sophisticated AI systems are becoming increasingly adept at identifying and weaponizing security flaws. Additionally, AI agents themselves are now writing applications and executing sensitive, privileged operations.

While attackers typically breach systems by circumventing authentication and authorization mechanisms, Loewy and co-founder Ben Waters focus their concern on the authority that agents accumulate once they gain entry. Authority encompasses the capability to determine which entities can access specific systems, which data can be retrieved and decrypted, and who possesses the power to authenticate, authorize, and delegate permissions. According to Loewy, "the problem is that it always lives somewhere, and someone always has access to it."

Tide proposes a framework termed emergent authority. Under this model, authority is not permanently assigned to any individual, infrastructure component, administrator, or AI system. Rather, it is dynamically generated only when identity, policy, context, and intent conditions are satisfied — and then it ceases to exist.

Limitations of centralized security architecture

Typical organizational systems concentrate application secrets, user credentials, and access permissions in a single location, then layer additional protective measures around this central point, including firewalls, key management systems, multifactor authentication, and endpoint monitoring tools.

Waters describes the fundamental problem: "Even if your code is perfectly free of bugs, it's sitting in someone else's cloud on someone else's operating system. There's this whole suite of dependencies where the code and everything needs to be perfectly patched all the time, everywhere, and configured correctly for your security to be perfect. That root paradigm is flawed. Tide seeks to overcome that by using cryptography to compute authority in pieces so that it can't be reassembled."

In practice, virtually every system contains vulnerabilities. Tide's objective is to ensure that when a breach occurs and an attacker obtains root access to a server, nothing of value remains to exploit, since authority has been architecturally dispersed across multiple locations.

From connected devices to distributed security infrastructure

Tide was established approximately ten years ago as an analytics service for Internet of Things applications, operating between manufacturers and users of connected health devices, smart home systems, and wearable technology. Regulated clients required assurance that breaches could not expose sensitive data, trigger GDPR penalties, or damage brand reputation.

The security infrastructure the organization developed for its own protection evolved into its commercial offering, providing a resolution to the persistent conflict between DevSecOps practices and product development velocity. This tension has intensified significantly in the context of AI-driven development.

The infrastructure now functions as TideCloak, a developer-focused product positioned at the layer where identity and access management operates. It manages authentication, authorization, end-to-end encryption, and compliance governance through Tide's Cybersecurity Fabric, ensuring that critical authority remains inaccessible to both people and systems.

The implementation is fully transparent through Tide's open-source repositories on GitHub. A technical white paper explaining emergent authority and its cryptographic foundations was created using a chatbot to clarify the underlying principles.

Delegating integration to AI agents

The feature most relevant to developers concerns the adoption pathway. Rather than requiring extensive documentation review, developers can assign the integration task to their AI assistant.

Loewy explains the rationale: "We needed this security apparatus or infrastructure that we've created to be something that can be seamlessly integrated into an existing project or best practice in a greenfield project, in a way where the developer doesn't need to read loads of documentation."

On Monday, Tide unveiled Raziel, an MCP server named after the angel associated with divine secrets. This tool equips AI assistants with comprehensive knowledge of Tide's authentication protocols, threshold cryptography, end-to-end encryption, and governance frameworks. Developers can direct their agent to Raziel, which can then recommend self-hosted or managed deployment options and produce verified integration guides. A TideCloak quickstart guide addresses the greenfield scenario for teams beginning with a fresh codebase.

Unlike conventional security tools that identify potential attack vectors, one of Raziel's capabilities maps the potential damage if a breach succeeds.

Loewy describes the inverted approach: "Where a typical cybersecurity scanner tries to find vulnerabilities- how someone's going to get into your platform — we've started the opposite way. We've said: they're already in. Here's what they're going to find. Here's where they can impersonate any user. Here's where they can assign themselves access to whatever they want."

Tide has also established a partnership with a Lloyd's of London insurance provider, permitting organizations that deploy TideCloak to access more favorable cyber insurance rates. Loewy notes that "It's a rare case of a security claim being backed by capital."

Scaling coordination without centralizing power

The organization envisions its role as analogous to DNS infrastructure — eventually becoming foundational technology that no single entity owns yet everyone relies upon.

Tide's scope extends beyond preventing breaches. Whenever an AI agent, external contractor, partner, or new vendor must perform critical operations, granting them access to powerful capabilities becomes necessary. This requirement for trust fundamentally constrains how extensively you can safely distribute authority or automate processes.

Loewy articulates the broader implication: "The point isn't just safer systems. Once nobody has to hold dangerous power to get something done, you can delegate real responsibility to an agent, a contractor, or a five-person startup without creating a dangerous insider. That's what lets developers ship with AI at full speed. It's coordination at scale without custody at scale."

Should this approach prove effective in production environments, Tide's most significant impact may transcend cybersecurity itself, instead reshaping the economics of delegation and expanding the scope of responsibility that small teams collaborating with AI agents can responsibly undertake.

Source: The New Stack