EP258 Why Your Security Strategy Needs an Immune System, Not a Fortress with Royal Hansen

Guest:

• Royal Hansen, VP of Engineering at Google, former CISO of Alphabet

Topics:

• The "God-Like Designer" Fallacy: You've argued that we need to move away from the "God-like designer" model of security—where we pre-calculate every risk like building a bridge—and towards a biological model. Can you explain why that old engineering mindset is becoming risky in today's cloud and AI environments?
• Resilience vs. Robustness: In your view, what is the practical difference between a robust system (like a fortress that eventually breaks) and a resilient system (like an immune system)? How does a CISO start shifting their team's focus from creating the former to nurturing the latter?
• Securing the Unknown: We're entering an era where AI agents will call other agents, creating pathways we never explicitly designed. If we can't predict these interactions, how can we possibly secure them? What does "emergent security" look like in practice?
• Primitives for Agents: You mentioned the need for new "biological primitives" for these agents—things like time-bound access or inherent throttling. Are these just new names for old concepts like Zero Trust, or is there something different about how we need to apply them to AI?
• The Compliance Friction: There's a massive tension between this dynamic, probabilistic reality and the static, checklist-based world of many compliance regimes. How do you, as a leader, bridge that gap? How do you convince an auditor or a board that a "probabilistic" approach doesn't just mean "we don't know for sure"?
•  "Safe" Failures: How can organizations get comfortable with the idea of designing for allowable failure in their subsystems, rather than striving for 100% uptime and security everywhere?

Resources:

• Video version
• EP189 How Google Does Security Programs at Scale: CISO Insights
• BigSleep and CodeMender agents
• "Chasing the Rabbit" book  
• "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology" book