matt

The runtime gap The first four articles in this series established a clean issuance model: SPIFFE for workload identity, OAuth SPIFFE Client Authentication for authentication to your authorization server, Token Exchange for delegation, Transaction Tokens for context propagation through the call chain. By the time a request reaches a downstream API, the credential is short-lived,

The token your agent is holding is the token an attacker wants An agentic workflow rarely terminates with a single API call. A user asks the agent a question; the agent calls an orchestration service; the orchestration service invokes three tools, each of which calls one or more backend APIs; some of those backends fan

The credential you keep distributing isn’t the credential you should be distributing If your authorization server is OAuth 2.0–based and your workloads are SPIFFE-identified, you have a credential redundancy problem. The workload already holds a SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document — an X.509-SVID or JWT-SVID or WIT-SVID — issued at runtime, bound to its identity, attested

Why your .env file is the problem Every agentic platform in production today has a credential management story, and most of those stories rhyme. An agent process — whether it’s a LangChain orchestrator, a Bedrock Agent, an MCP-host pattern, or something custom — needs to authenticate to upstream LLM providers, downstream tools, vector stores, and

Agents Are Workloads: Why the Last Decade of Identity Standards Already Solves 95% of Agentic Identity   The fork in the road The agentic identity conversation has split into two camps. One camp argues that AI agents are a fundamentally new species of non-human identity (NHI) and require a new stack: agent-specific identifiers, agent-specific consent