How identity management is shifting into the agent era – Source: securityboulevard.com

Let’s break down how identity must evolve across the key functions to support secure, scalable AI agent architectures.

Agent Authentication: Verifying Digital Actors in Real Time

Human users log in with passwords, biometrics, or passkeys.
Agents authenticate through cryptographic proofs.

Agentic authentication uses:

• SPIFFE/SVID: Secure identities for workloads via signed X.509 certs.
• PKCE: For OAuth flows without secret sharing.
• mTLS + JWT tokens: For verifiable session binding.

Agents don’t log in. They present short-lived credentials bound to specific identities, tasks, and lifespans.

Access Control: Enforcing Runtime Guardrails for Agents

RBAC and ABAC aren’t enough when an agent can change tasks every second.

Modern agent access control uses:

• Scoped, time-bound tokens
• Dynamic ABAC policies (task + user intent + risk)
• Policy-as-code engines (OPA, Cedar)

These controls are enforced at the proxy or API layer, ideally via something like Strata’s App Fabric or an MCP-aware API gateway.

Authorization: Delegation and On-Behalf-Of Workflows

Many agents act on behalf of users.
This requires:

• OAuth On-Behalf-Of (OBO) support
• Delegation tracking from user → agent → downstream service
• Signed claims asserting role, intent, and task scope

This makes it possible to trace and trust the full execution chain.

Auditing: Visibility into Agent Behavior and Decision Chains

Logging an API call isn’t enough when agents are autonomous.

Agent observability includes:

• Execution graphs that trace multi-agent workflows
• Signed attestations for critical actions
• Context-rich telemetry (e.g., what data was accessed, by which agent, on whose behalf)

These logs feed into SIEM systems and support real-time compliance validation.

Administration & Lifecycle Governance: Just-in-Time, Policy-Driven Identity

Instead of manual provisioning, agent identity must be:

• Ephemeral and JIT-issued
• Scoped with TTL
• Managed via CI/CD pipelines

Agent registries track:

• Agent metadata
• Assigned scopes and policies
• Lifecycle events and revocations

This prevents identity sprawl and ensures only active agents have active credentials.