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Agent Trust Cloud
ConsoleMachine identity

The identities that authenticate when nobody is present

Workloads, service accounts, pipelines and integration users — each with an owner, a purpose, the credentials it holds and the permissions it has never once used.

A seeded estate, not live customer data. Scores are summed from the factors on each identity, and the shared-credential findings are derived from which agents run as what — not written down, so an identity that gains a second consumer gains the finding with it.

Estate summary

7

Machine identities

4

Holding a long-lived secret

3

Missing an owner

1

Dormant, still enabled

3

Credential expiring soon

1

Credentials shared by several agents

283

Granted actions never used

3

Scoring 65 or above

Estate

Ranked by risk

The dormant account is near the top without having authenticated in nearly a year. That is the point: it is not being used, and it could still do everything it was ever able to.

The chain

Why an inventory on its own answers nothing

An agent list tells you what is running. An identity list tells you what can authenticate. Neither answers the question that matters during an incident — if this credential is compromised, which agents were relying on it — because that answer lives in the link between them.

  1. 01Human owner
  2. 02AI agent
  3. 03Machine identity
  4. 04Credential
  5. 05Resource

Credentials more than one agent depends on

Credentials

The ladder off standing secrets

Most machine-identity risk is one property: a secret that does not expire, held by something that cannot be asked why it still has it.

  1. 01Static secret held by the workload
  2. 02Federated workload identity
  3. 03Short-lived credential, brokered per action
short-lived

Minutes to hours. Expires before it is worth stealing.

Federated token · Managed identity · SPIFFE SVID · Temporary STS credential · OAuth access token

medium-lived

Days to weeks. Worth rotating on a schedule somebody keeps.

Signed JWT · X.509 certificate

long-lived

Months, or never. The thing this module exists to eliminate.

OAuth refresh token · Client secret · API key · Cloud access key · SSH key · Database password

Discovery

Read-only first, and that is a product decision

Asking for write access to a customer's identity provider on day one is how a security tool fails to get installed at all. Discovery reads and recommends; remediation comes after the inventory has earned trust.

Microsoft Entra ID

  • Applications
  • Service principals
  • Managed identities
  • Federated credentials
  • Role assignments
  • API permissions

AWS

  • IAM roles
  • Access keys
  • Instance profiles
  • Lambda and ECS task roles
  • Roles Anywhere
  • Cross-account trust policies

Google Cloud

  • Service accounts
  • Service-account keys
  • Workload identity federation
  • IAM bindings
  • Cloud Run and Function identities

Kubernetes

  • Clusters and namespaces
  • Service accounts
  • Role and cluster-role bindings
  • Secrets
  • Workloads using each identity

GitHub

  • GitHub Apps
  • Actions workflows
  • Deploy keys
  • OAuth apps
  • Cloud federation
  • Workflows still using long-lived cloud keys

Databases

  • Application users
  • Privileged machine accounts
  • Stale logins
  • Shared identities

Classification

Three classes, and an agent is one of the machines

That is not a technicality. An agent that cannot be reasoned about as a workload is an agent whose credentials nobody is inventorying.

Human identity

A person. Authenticates because somebody is present to do it.

Employee · Contractor · Administrator · Partner

Machine identity

Software acting on its own. Authenticates because it was configured to, often long ago.

Application · Service · Container · CI/CD workflow · API client

AI agent identity

A machine identity that decides what to do next. It is the only one of the three that can surprise you.

Autonomous agent · Copilot · Multi-agent system