Track 06 · Security & risk reviewLesson 08 of 10
Agent credentials, from issue to revoke
Non-human identities that don't outlive the project as standing risk.
- Lesson library · reference
- 30 min read
- 70 min hands-on
- Northvale Bank
- Pro
What you'll be able to do
01- Explain what a non-human identity (NHI) is, how an identity differs from its credentials, and why agents multiply NHI risk.
- Build an NHI inventory with owners, purposes, scopes and usage, and diagnose stale, ownerless, over-scoped, reused and long-lived credentials.
- Choose an issuance pattern (workload identity federation, cloud IAM roles, SPIFFE SVIDs, STS-minted tokens, vaulted static secrets) and defend the order of preference.
- Design rotation, revocation and a kill switch with a measured time-to-kill, and delegation chains using RFC 8693 token exchange and the
actclaim. - Map a customer's NHI posture to the OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10 in a security review.
Before you start
- SSO and provisioning for agents: human identity, propagation to the agent, and agent identities in the IdP.
- Tools with scoped, auditable access: per-tool scopes, on-behalf-of versus service identity at the tool.
- Authorization and multi-tenancy: the agent ceiling and user ∩ agent.
- SaaS connectors and auth flows: OAuth grants and connector tokens.
- Background: you can read a JWT's claims and know what an OAuth client is.
The short version
A non-human identity is any principal that is not a person: service accounts, API keys, OAuth clients, workload identities and, now, agent identities. Each agent typically holds several, one per system it touches, created during a pilot by someone who later moves on. The lifecycle discipline is: register every identity with an accountable owner and purpose; issue credentials without stored secrets where possible, through federation or a token service, short-lived and narrowly scoped; rotate what must stay static; review usage against grants; and revoke fast, with a kill switch you have drilled. Delegation chains carry both the user and the agent in the token, and each hop narrows.
- No owner, no token. Ownerless identities are the standing risk this competency exists to remove.
- The best secret is no secret. Prefer federation and short-lived tokens; vault and rotate only what cannot be federated.
- Short TTL is your revocation latency. A 15-minute token can only be misused for 15 minutes after you pull the plug.
- Grant what is used. Compare scopes granted with scopes seen in logs and remove the difference.
- Retire on purpose. When the project ends, the identity ends, on a date someone owns.
Pro lesson
The rest of this lesson is in Pro.
The mental model, worked example, field note, failure table, exercise and self-check, with the voice tutor.
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