01 / Principal and identity
Who acts, and what can the platform identify?
An agent service runs as a SPIFFE-identified workload under an organization’s task.
SPIFFE ID and SVID attest workload identity to a relying party.
- 01Originating task
- 02Agent or workload
- 03It invokes a production maintenance API.
- 04Observed effect
02 / Action-time control
Where can an unauthorized effect be stopped?
Validate SVID at the service boundary; separately decide task, verb and target.
Bind workload ID to owner, task grant, environment and expiry.
Delegation constraint
A child process using the same workload identity needs separate task attribution or a narrowed grant.
03 / Worked denial
Test a request outside the grant.
A valid workload attempts to restart a database outside its incident scope.
Adversarial verification
Authenticate a valid SVID from the maintenance workload and request a restart for an unrelated incident. The relying service must separate certificate acceptance from task authorization.
04 / Review and responsibility
What should the audit trail prove?
SVID validation, workload ID, grant, incident, target, decision and API result.
SPIFFE does not define business authorization for agent actions.
Platform primary source