By: Kate Middagh and Michael Spisak
Vibe Coding and Vulnerability: Why Security Can’t Keep Up
The promise of AI-assisted development, or “vibe coding,” is undeniable: unprecedented speed and productivity for development teams. In a landscape defined by complex cloud-native architectures and intense demand for new software, this force multiplier is rapidly becoming standard practice. However, this speed comes at a severe, often unaddressed cost. As AI agents generate functional code in seconds, they are frequently failing to enforce critical security controls, introducing mass vulnerabilities, technical debt, and real-world breach scenarios.
This challenge is magnified by the rise of citizen developers who lack the literacy to review or secure the code being generated. For every leader—from the CEO to the CISO, and every technical practitioner—understanding this gap is critical. This article introduces the SHIELD framework to put necessary governance back into the coding process, ensuring we scale productivity without scaling risk.
Identifying and Addressing Vibe Coding Risks
A user types a simple prompt: // Write a function to fetch user data from the customer API. In seconds, a dozen lines of functional code appear.
This is the new reality of vibe coding. The productivity gains are undeniable. Development teams, already stretched thin by complex Software Development Life Cycles (SDLCs) and cloud-native pressures, now have a powerful force multiplier.
But this new speed comes with a hidden, and severe, cost.
What happens when that AI-generated function correctly fetches the data, but neglects to include vital authentication and rate-limiting controls? What happens when the AI agent is tricked by a malicious prompt into exfiltrating sensitive data?
As organizations rapidly adopt these tools, a dangerous gap is widening between productivity and security. The “nightmare scenarios” are no longer hypothetical; they are documented, real-world incidents.
The accelerated demand for software, increasing reliance on cloud-native technologies, and widespread adoption of DevOps have intensified the complexity and resource requirements of the SDLC. Vibe coding offers a silver lining, enabling teams to do more with less. However, in the wake of wider adoption, Unit 42 has observed that real-life catastrophic failures have occurred:
- Insecure Application Development Leading to Breach: A sales lead application was successfully breached because the vibe coding agent neglected to incorporate key security controls, such as those for authentication and rate limiting, into the build.
- Insecure Platform Logic Leading to Code Execution: Researchers discovered a critical flaw via indirect prompt injection that allowed malicious command injection via untrusted content, executing arbitrary code and enabling exfiltration of sensitive data.
- Insecure Platform Logic Leading to Authentication Bypass: A critical flaw in the authentication logic for a popular program allowed a bypass of controls by simply displaying an application’s publicly visible ID in an API request.
- Rogue Database Deletion Leading to Data Loss: An AI agent, despite explicit instructions to freeze production changes, deleted the entire production database for a community application.
Understanding the Root Causes of Vibe Coding Risk
These incidents are symptoms of predictable, fundamental gaps in how AI models operate. From our analysis, these risks cluster into a few key categories:
- Models Prioritize Function Over Security: AI agents are optimized to provide a working answer, fast. They are not inherently optimized to ask critical security questions, resulting in an “insecure by default” nature. Use of security scanning or “judge agents” in many of these tools is elective, leaving potential security gaps.
- Critical Context Blindness: An AI agent lacks the situational awareness a human developer possesses (e.g., distinguishing between production and development environments).
- The “Phantom” Supply Chain Risk: AI models often “hallucinate” helpful-sounding libraries or code packages that do not exist, leading to unresolvable dependencies.
- Citizen Developers and Developer Over-Trust: Personnel without a development background lack training in how to write secure code. The democratization of code development is thus accelerating the introduction of security vulnerabilities and long-term technical debt. Additionally, the code looks correct and it works. This creates a false sense of security, accelerating vulnerabilities due to a lack of traditional change control and secure code review.
What Unit 42 is Seeing
Unit 42 has found that most evaluated organizations allow employees to use vibe coding tools due to the absence of hard blocks (e.g., blocking tools at the firewall). However, very few of these organizations have performed a formal risk assessment on the use of these tools, and very few are monitoring inputs, outputs, and security outcomes.
Addressing Risk Through the SHIELD Framework
The proliferating threat landscape may seem unmanageable, but returning to the first principles of security controls is the answer. Unit 42 works with clients to implement the “SHIELD” framework for vibe coding, placing properly designed security controls back into the coding process.
- S – Separation of Duties: Vibe coding platforms may overaggregate privileges. Ensure that incompatible duties (e.g., access to development and production) are not granted to AI agents. Restrict agents to development and test environments only.
- H – Human in the Loop: Vibe coding platforms may fail to enforce human review. For any code impacting critical functions, ensure a mandatory secure code review performed by a human and require a Pull Request (PR) approval prior to code merge. This is vital when non-developers are involved.
- I – Input/Output Validation:
- Input: Sanitize prompts by separating trusted instructions from untrusted data via guardrails (prompt partitioning, encoding, role-based separation).
- Output: Require the AI to perform validation of logic checks and code through Static Application Security Testing (SAST) after development and before merging.
- E – Enforce Security-Focused Helper Models: Develop external/independent Helper Models to perform SAST testing, secrets scanning, security control verification, and other critical validation functions to identify vulnerabilities and hard-coded secrets prior to deployment.
- L – Least Agency: Implement the principle of least agency for all vibe coding platforms and AI agents. Only grant the minimum permissions and capabilities required to perform their role. Restrict access to sensitive files and guardrail any destructive commands.
- D – Defensive Technical Controls: Employ defensive controls around supply chain and execution management, such as performing Software Composition Analysis (SCA) on components before consumption, and disabling auto-execution to allow for human-in-the-loop and helper agent involvement in deployment.
Securing Vibe Coding: A Non-Negotiable for the AI Era
Ultimately, the age of “vibe coding” has arrived, but the vibes will benefit from careful tuning. Speed without security rigor can quickly lead to irreversible outcomes. Identifying tactical security controls that adequately address the risk ensures we can take the safe path to vibe coding bliss and avoid the difficult path to catastrophic scenarios we cannot take back.