Manage Agent Identity

Use this skill to govern the full Non-Human Identity (NHI) lifecycle for AI agent sessions. In 2025–2026, agents are privileged identities that often outnumber human identities at ratios of 82:1 or higher. Standard IAM service account patterns are insufficient — agents require task-scoped, just-in-time credentials with behavioral monitoring and formal offboarding.

Aligned with: IMDA Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI (May 2026), NIST AI 100-2, Cloud Security Alliance NHI guidance (2026), and OWASP ASI03 (Identity & Privilege Abuse).

Core Rules

• Zero Standing Privileges: never use static, long-lived API keys or persistent credentials for agent sessions. All agent tokens must be ephemeral (TTL ≤ 60 minutes or task duration + 20% buffer) and dynamically injected.
• Task-scope permissions & attenuation (RFC 8693): issue down-scoped, attenuated delegation tokens. Agents must never inherit unconstrained human credentials or broad service-account scopes.
• SPIFFE/SPIRE Workload Attestation: attest agent workloads cryptographically using SPIFFE IDs and JWT/X.509 SVIDs bound to execution provenance (spiffe://prod.internal/ns/agents/...).
• OAuth agent_auth metadata: configure and validate the agent_auth discovery block in /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource and /auth.md before granting access.
• Formal registration: every agent role in production must be registered in the organization's identity registry before receiving any access. Shadow agents must be discovered and registered or decommissioned.
• Behavioral baseline required: every production agent role must declare a behavioral baseline (allowed tools, expected resource paths, rate limits). Out-of-baseline calls trigger immediate circuit breaker halts.
• Immediate offboarding: when a task completes, fails, or an agent role is decommissioned, all associated credentials, tokens, and active sessions must be revoked immediately.
• Never let an agent identity outlive its declared task: every offboarding must revoke credentials and archive the audit trail in the same atomic operation
• Validate SPIFFE/SPIRE attestation at every credential issuance, not just at session start; rotated workload identity must re-attest before any new token is issued
• Do not allow an agent to self-renew credentials without re-validation against action-boundaries.yaml; treat auto-renewal without re-check as a policy violation
• Classify session traces with data-classification.yaml; redact PII and credentials before archiving to long-term storage