Secrets and identity for AI agents

Why this conversation

An AI agent that acts for a user needs credentials of its own, and how it gets them is a question for whoever runs the platform. OpenBao, the open source secrets manager that forked from HashiCorp Vault, has been looking at exactly that. At Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, the host met Tony of OpenBao in the OpenSSF area for a short conversation, about four minutes. The same day the show also recorded Alex Scheel on OpenBao 2.7. The rest of the week is in Open Source Summit Europe 2026: who we met.

An identity for each agent

The team has recently looked at how OpenBao can help isolate agentic AI, using SPIFFE for workload identity. That makes authentication easier for agents, for example agents running on your computer. It works through OpenBao’s PKI engine, which gained policy support in one of the latest versions: the engine can now issue certificates that are valid, verifiable SPIFFE documents. Your agents can then use that SPIFFE identity outside your computer to connect to external services.

So should an agent use its user’s credentials? “Well, it should always use dynamic secrets, of course.” Not long-lived secrets, which you do not want to spread around. Instead, connect your agents to OpenBao, create the secrets on the fly and give them a short lifetime, so that they expire and do not leak.

Where the project is

“Well, we are just at the beginning, of course.” The PKI extension can create SPIFFE identities today. Doing the same for JWTs is not there yet; the team plans to look at it in the next release. The mechanisms are in OpenBao from 2.6 onwards. And two weeks before the conversation the project released 2.7.0, which finally brings external keys: cryptographic operations can now run on your HSM.

On SDKs, OpenBao is a fork of Vault and stays compatible with its API, so any SDK that works with Vault works with OpenBao: Go, Python, Ruby, whichever you choose.

Getting started

The easiest way in is the documentation on openbao.org, along with the courses there, and courses on Killercoda where you can learn more.

Part of the OpenSSF

“OpenBao is a project that is part of the OpenSSF.” It sits under the OpenSSF umbrella, within the Linux Foundation, and Tony says the project appreciates the help it gets from the OpenSSF, sponsorship included. In Prague, for example, OpenBao had no booth of its own, but the team could stay with the OpenSSF people and talk about OpenBao with everyone interested. The people the show has met from the project are on OpenBao: the people on Udienza.