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APRA's information security standard already covers the APIs your agents run on. Most institutions cannot yet evidence it.
All APRA-regulated institutions in Australia are bound to meet CPS 234. This is the Prudential Standard for Information Security. Whether that's a bank, insurance provider, or super fund, they all fall under CPS 234, as do their third-party providers. Together, these institutions hold trillions of dollars in assets. CPS 234 has been around for a while now, and many InfoSec teams are aware of it.
What's changed is the workloads these institutions are running. Agents now summarise, investigate, and update systems. All of these tasks will involve using an API. This doesn't exempt agents from CPS 234. But it does mean a large chunk of what these institutions do will fall under CPS 234, and it's no coincidence that CPS 234 was designed to cover this.
Since then, further APRA standards have come into play that continue to expand the use case. Operational Risk Management, CPS 230, came into play on 1st July 2025. Expectations around third-party service providers have grown and will continue to grow as more systems become reliant on these agents and APIs.
APIs are covered under CPS 234
As mentioned above, CPS 234 expects that a regulated entity maintains an information security capability that is proportionate to the scale and nature of threats to information assets. Information assets can include software and hardware used within the business. An API would qualify as an information asset. Data will flow through an API, and increasingly so by agents instead of users.
There are many requirements laid out by CPS 234 that apply directly to APIs. Information assets must be classified by criticality and sensitivity. Controls should be put in place and tested. There also needs to be a response plan in place for information security incidents, and you need to be able to evidence that. All of this relies on knowing what information assets you have.
Where most institutions fall short
Many institutions won't be able to evidence that they have the right controls in place for their APIs. CPS 234 wants you to show that your controls are working. You'll need to be able to provide evidence of that to your auditors and, if required, APRA. Here are a few reasons why that's hard to do for APIs.
You may not have a full inventory of your APIs. Developers are building and exposing APIs at a faster rate than you can keep track of. Meaning there are information assets that you should be classifying but don't even know about. You may have documentation and reviews done before your API goes live, but once it's in production, it can behave very differently. As we've learned from using AI agents, there are now consumers of your API that may not be under your control.
Without knowing what APIs you have, you can't classify them. You can't ensure you have controls in place that will protect your API if you don't know it exists. You can't evidence that your controls are working if you don't know what's happening on that API.
Here's how you can meet the requirement:
- Keep a running list of all your APIs and make sure everything is classified,
- Know what agents and services are consuming your API's and what permissions they have,
- Validate that your controls are actually working in production, and
- have a record of all information that's accessed so you can evidence your controls are working.
These steps aren't out of the ordinary. It's just something we expect from all our information assets. It's no different when AI agents consume those assets.
CPS 234 applies to your APIs and agents.
With AI agents, we've opened up another layer to CPS 234 that needs to be accounted for. If you want to make sure you're meeting the requirements of CPS 234, you need to know what you have. Salt can help you with that. By discovering all your APIs and understanding what's consuming them, you can start providing evidence that you have controls in place and that they're working. It won't make you compliant, but it can help with some of the challenges you may face when trying to meet the requirements of CPS 234.
If you want to learn more about Salt and how we can help you, please contact us, schedule a demo, or visit our website.