Add idea: agent identity and tool authorization - #36
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August 12, 2026 17:34
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Proposes closing a fourth platform gap: managed agent platforms are converging on the same identity pillar (workload identity, credential vault, and delegated outbound auth). AWS ships all three; Google, Azure, and Anthropic ship parts of it. CF already operates most of the parts: Diego instance identity certs, UAA, and CredHub, which already accepts instance identity certs as an mTLS client credential. What's missing is a runtime authorization model connecting them.
Three layers:: a precondition, a proposal, and a direction:
RFC-0055 default-deny route policies as reachability-level authorization; no new components.
UAA accepts instance identity certs as a client credential (RFC 8705/8693, neither implemented today) and mints short-lived workload tokens. CF-hosted MCP servers get most of an OAuth 2.1 authorization server, and the credential-less sidecar holds scoped tokens instead of provider keys for tools that trust UAA.
delegation chains per the AOAT draft: the platform records user → agent → tool authority; the tool enforces.
The note names the alternative it has to beat (SPIRE plus an off-the-shelf OAuth server, brokered as a marketplace service, zero platform delta) and the real problem: CF authorizes humans at deploy time, and nothing authorizes workloads at runtime. A workload-credential grant expands UAA's attack surface, per-operation scopes explode across hundreds of tools, and autonomous pipelines have no user present for the consent step AOAT assumes.
Mirrors RFC-0055 (the inbound half) and builds on the merged
open-agent-auth.mdnote. Sibling tocredential-less-agent-processes, whose sidecar this gives a standard, short-lived token to hold.