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AI Identity Federation

AI Identity Federation

Overview

AI Identity Federation deals with the interoperability of identities across different clouds, model providers, and vector stores. In a multi-agent system, an agent running in AWS might need to query a vector database in Pinecone, call a model in Azure OpenAI, and write results to Snowflake.

Using long-lived static keys for each of these connections is unmanageable and insecure. Federation allows trust to be established between these disparate domains using open standards like OIDC and SAML.

Architecture

Using OIDC Federation to access multi-cloud resources without secrets.

Diagram

Key Decisions

  • Trust Anchors: Who is the ultimate source of truth? Usually the cloud platform where the compute runs (AWS IAM, Google Service Account) or a dedicated machine identity provider.
  • Audience Restriction (aud): Tokens must be strictly scoped to the intended recipient service to prevent replay attacks (Token Substitution).
  • Mapping Rules: How to map claims from the incoming token (e.g., namespace: production) to permissions in the target system.

Implementation

OIDC Exchange

Most modern SaaS tools for AI (Pinecone, Weaviate, Databricks) support OIDC federation. Instead of an API Key, you configure the target service to trust your Identity Provider's issuer URL (https://...).

Workflow:

  1. Agent retrieves a signed OIDC Identity Token from its environment (e.g., AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE).
  2. Agent includes this token in the header when calling the external service.
  3. External service validates the signature against the public keys of the issuer.

SPIFFE Federation

For complex multi-cluster or multi-cloud setups (e.g., hybrid cloud), SPIFFE Federation allows two different SPIFFE trust domains to exchange bundles and verify each other's identities via mTLS.

Risks

  • Misconfigured Trust Policies: Allowing wildcards (*) in the subject claim validation (e.g., allowing any GitHub Action to access your production AWS account).
  • Issuer Spoofing: Failing to validate the iss (Issuer) claim strictly.
  • Token Interception: If TLS is not enforced, bearer tokens can be stolen in transit.