HashiCorp vs P0 Security

About P0 Security

P0 Security sells runtime access control that preserves identity and context while enforcing authorization as sensitive actions are attempted. The P0 Runtime Access platform combines discovery of where privilege and access exist, control of access and actions at runtime and an audit trail of what happened. P0 Security gives visibility and control over what agents, users and machines can access and do, in one platform.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

P0 Security describes a problem in which organizations have too much standing privilege, too many credentials and too little visibility into who can do what. P0 Security says AI agents are becoming active participants in enterprise systems: they authenticate, call APIs, execute commands and move data, often on behalf of a human, another agent or a machine. P0 Security states that security teams need to understand what has access, enforce policy across the full action chain and preserve the context needed to explain every decision and action.^[3][4][5]

P0 Security continuously identifies agents, users and machines, along with the privileges, access paths and relationships behind them. P0 Security surfaces standing access and risky connections. P0 Security can grant just-in-time privilege, deny unauthorized actions or require human approval. P0 Security provisions native access in the target based on the task the agent is working on, subject to policy. P0 applies time-bound, purpose-specific permissions based on the action being requested and the context around it. P0 Security can grant access only for the task at hand and revoke it automatically when the approval window or task ends.^[3][5]

P0 identifies whether a task was initiated by a human, a machine or an agent, and preserves that originator context alongside the acting agent. P0 preserves the originator, the acting agent and the delegation chain between them, so policy can evaluate the full identity behind the action instead of trusting the agent credential alone. P0 Security evaluates every agent action before execution based on identity, context and intent. P0 Security replaces static permissions and implicit trust with real-time, policy-driven authorization. A data layer in P0 Security maps all access back to the IdP-defined identity. P0 extends authorization across the full agent action chain, from the originating user through agents, tools and into the target system. P0 evaluates identity, tool access and permissions together at runtime instead of treating them as separate controls.^[1][3][6][7]

P0 Security tracks privilege drift, policy exceptions and access changes so teams can support audits, compliance and investigations.^[3]

P0 integrates with the identity, infrastructure, collaboration and target systems already in an environment, with SDKs and APIs for extending enforcement into custom applications and workflows. P0 Security provides an SDK that brings runtime authorization into MCP servers, using JWTs and IdP claims to map user identity to the tools, actions and resources users are allowed to access.^[3][5]

P0 Security says it has worked through agent access patterns with customers and design partners as they build and deploy agents in production and pre-production environments. In one pattern, a user asks an agent to inspect service account permissions, troubleshoot access or make an IAM change. In that pattern, P0 keeps the user and agent identities linked from the start, so the requester remains part of the authorization context. For actions that change permissions, P0 Security can check whether the user is on call, whether a matching ticket exists or whether some other approval condition has been met. In a reporting workflow, a Reporting Agent may receive a request, call a BigQuery Agent to retrieve data, then use that result to generate a report. P0 carries the context forward when the Reporting Agent delegates part of the work to a downstream agent. In the coding agent use case, P0 evaluates the specific action, target resource, engineer scope, agent capability and any required business context, such as a matching Jira ticket or approved change window. P0 grants short-lived access only to the resource and action in scope once a request is approved. In a headless SRE case, a PagerDuty incident or other approved trigger starts the workflow, and a registered workload launches the SRE agent without a person actively operating it. An AI security company used P0 to replace broad, standing developer access with just-in-time, policy-driven access across GCP, SSH and emergency workflows, while keeping Okta, PagerDuty, Slack and CLI workflows intact.^{[2][3][5][8][9][10][11][12][13]}