Your Agent Just Paid for Nothing: 6 Attacks on x402 Payments - Ishween Kaur, SoFi
x402 agent payment protocol is in a 'wild west' stage with exploitable security vulnerabilities
“X42 protocol is still in the "wild west" stage”
Ishween Kaur from SoFi presents six attack vectors against the x402 payment protocol, which enables AI agents to make autonomous micropayments via blockchain. The protocol fills a decades-old HTTP 402 placeholder by defining how machines can transact, with Cloudflare already exploring it via 'pay-per-crawl' for publishers. The talk highlights that agents need authorization, budget, and permission checks before paying—security primitives the nascent protocol currently lacks.