From Pets To Cattle To Agents: Evolving Identity And Security For Workloads
“Treat servers like cattle, not pets” captured one of the biggest shifts in how we run infrastructure. Now, AI agents are forcing another mental shift, as we anthropomorphize these nondeterministic autonomous processes. How do we handle delegation, security, and identity for these agentic systems? This talk will look at the state of authentication and authorization across services today, how we got here, and look into why human and non-human identity management diverged.
“Treat servers like cattle, not pets” captured one of the biggest shifts in how we run infrastructure. Going from servers we named with masking tape on the case to infrastructure-as-code to deploy thousands of processes changed the mental model around authentication and authorization.
Now, AI agents are forcing another mental shift, as we anthropomorphize these nondeterministic autonomous processes. Many people in the industry are now contemplating how we should handle delegation, security, and identity for these agentic systems.
We will look to answer why human and non-human identity management diverged and what that means to various parts of our organizations.
This talk will look at the state of authentication and authorization across services today and how we got here. The audience will walk away with a much better sense of where we are headed with machine-to-machine authentication, covering:
- SPIFFE/SPIRE
- WIMSE and Workload Identity Tokens (WIT)
- Security Token Services (STS)
- Federated Identities on Cloud Providers
Dwayne McDaniel is a Principal Developer Advocate who has been on a mission to "help people figure stuff out" for over a decade. At GitGuardian, he specializes in secrets security and non-human identity governance across cloud and DevOps environments. A frequent speaker at events like DevOpsDays and BSides, he helps security and engineering teams better understand complex issues.