I have a related question, is anyone developing standards on how agents can proxy the requestor identity to backend database or application layers? (short lived oauth tokens perhaps, not long lived credentials like the ShowHN seems to focus on?)
T from Infisical here - Also forgot to mention that this is a research preview launch for Agent Vault and should be treated as such - experimental <<
Since the project is in active development, the form factor including API is unstable but I think it gives a good first glance into how we're thinking about secrets management for AI agents; we made some interesting architectural decisions along the way to get here, and I think this is generally on the right track with how the industry is thinking about solving credential exfiltration: thru credential brokering.
We'd appreciate any feedback; feel free also to raise issues, and contribute - this is very much welcome :)
Curious how you think about this meeting the agent-identity side. The proxy knows who's calling, but the callee (what agent lives at api.example.com, what auth it expects, what its card looks like) doesn't really have a home. Been poking at that half at agents.ml and it feels like the two pieces want to fit together
From what I can tell, agent-vault does not solve identity, only how its stored. For true agent identity, you should look into: https://github.com/highflame-ai/zeroid (author: full disclosure)
ZeroID looks like a good idea to me. Lots there I'll be digging into over time, and related to the use of token exchange for authorising back-end M2M transactions on behalf of a user at the front-end.
As far as I can tell the parent post is talking about discovery for agent-to-agent communications, which is not something I have much interest in myself: it feels very "OpenClaw" to replace stable, deterministic APIs with LLMs.
Yeah I'm leaning deterministic too for most needs, but I do think there's a future for agent to agent communication in more specialized cases. I think an agent having access to proprietary datasets / niche software can produce an interesting output. Say someone wants a drawing in autocad, communicating with a trained agent that has mcp access to these kind of tools seems like it could be beneficial to extend a more generalist agent's capabilities.
Can I use Infisical cloud vaults with Agent Vault? I like the UI of secret management there. I like that I can manage secrets from many environments in a single place.
We'll be releasing a closer integration between Agent Vault and Infisical in the coming 1-2 weeks!
The way we see it is that you'd still need to centrally store/manage secrets from a vault; this part isn't going anywhere and should still deliver secrets to the rest of your workloads.
The part that's new is Agent Vault which is really a delivery mechanism to help agents use secrets in a way that they don't get leaked. So, it would be natural to integrate the two.
This doesn't change the fact that you'd still be able to exfiltrate data like sure they don't get credentials but if they get the proxy auth key then they would also be able to make requests through it no?
I use containers to isolate agents to just the data I intend for them to read and modify. If I have a data exfiltration event, it'll be limited to what I put into the container plus whatever code run inside the container can reach.
I have limited data in reach of the agent, limited network access for it, and was missing exactly this Vault. I'm relieved not to need to invent (vibe code) it.
Yeah so Agent Vault (AV) solves the credential exfiltration problem which is related to but different from data exfiltration.
You're right that if an attacker can access the proxy vault then by definition they'd similarly be able to proxy requests through it to get data back but at least AV prevents them from gaining direct access to begin with (the key to access the proxy vault itself can also be made ephemeral, scoped to a particular agent run). I'd also note that you'd want to lockdown the networking around AV so it isn't just exposed to the public internet.
Since the project is in active development, the form factor including API is unstable but I think it gives a good first glance into how we're thinking about secrets management for AI agents; we made some interesting architectural decisions along the way to get here, and I think this is generally on the right track with how the industry is thinking about solving credential exfiltration: thru credential brokering.
We'd appreciate any feedback; feel free also to raise issues, and contribute - this is very much welcome :)
As far as I can tell the parent post is talking about discovery for agent-to-agent communications, which is not something I have much interest in myself: it feels very "OpenClaw" to replace stable, deterministic APIs with LLMs.
The way we see it is that you'd still need to centrally store/manage secrets from a vault; this part isn't going anywhere and should still deliver secrets to the rest of your workloads.
The part that's new is Agent Vault which is really a delivery mechanism to help agents use secrets in a way that they don't get leaked. So, it would be natural to integrate the two.
This is definitely on the roadmap!
I use containers to isolate agents to just the data I intend for them to read and modify. If I have a data exfiltration event, it'll be limited to what I put into the container plus whatever code run inside the container can reach.
I have limited data in reach of the agent, limited network access for it, and was missing exactly this Vault. I'm relieved not to need to invent (vibe code) it.
You're right that if an attacker can access the proxy vault then by definition they'd similarly be able to proxy requests through it to get data back but at least AV prevents them from gaining direct access to begin with (the key to access the proxy vault itself can also be made ephemeral, scoped to a particular agent run). I'd also note that you'd want to lockdown the networking around AV so it isn't just exposed to the public internet.
The general idea is that we're converging as an industry on credential brokering as one type of layered defense mechanism for agents: https://infisical.com/blog/agent-vault-the-open-source-crede...