SOLVING THE IDENTITY CRISIS FOR AI AGENTS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Uber faced two issues with agentic identity: its current identity model wasn't designed to account for agents acting on behalf of users, and provenance wasn't properly carried across different agents in a workflow. To address this, Uber implemented an identity system in which workflows begin by requesting a workload ID from SPIRE. That ID is then presented to a custom STS, which verifies in its agent registry that the requested agent is allowed to run on that workflow and returns a JWT with the relevant details to the workload. To simplify adoption, Uber built a standardized Agent-to-Agent client that provides an automatic, secure-by-default path.