Eradicating Static Credentials in Autonomous Systems

Static API keys in autonomous AI agent deployments represent the dominant supply-chain attack vector in production agentic systems. This post-mortem analyzes the failure modes of long-lived credentials in non-deterministic execution contexts and presents the architecture for Workload Identity Federation, OIDC-based short-lived token issuance, and Sigstore keyless signing as the replacement primitive for every credential class in the agentic stack.