AI Agent Identity
AI Agent Identity,
Enforced Below the Model.
Give every autonomous agent a cryptographic identity. Short-lived certificates, automated lifecycle, and access controls below the model layer, where a prompt cannot reach.
Trusted By
82:1
Machine identities outnumber humans in enterprises18%
Are confident their IAM handles AI agents>50%
Of agent attacks exploit access-control gaps2029
47-day TLS mandate takes full effectTHE PROBLEM
Why AI Agent Identity
Breaks Down
The same gaps keep showing up. Agents run on credentials built for predictable workloads, not for actors that reason and act on inputs someone else can craft.
Too Much Access
Agents on shared service accounts carry permissions far beyond what any single task needs. One bad prompt and that full access is in play.
Tokens Prove Sessions
API keys and bearer tokens show that a session opened. They cannot prove who authorized the action or whether it was within policy when it ran.
Controls Live Inside
OAuth scopes and gateway rules sit inside the runtime the agent already controls. A compromised agent is past them before they fire.
No Agent Inventory
Agents get deployed by multiple teams with no central registry. You cannot enforce a certificate policy on identities nobody has counted yet.
No Migration Path
RSA and ECDSA underpin every agent certificate today. Both face deprecation before 2030. Without crypto-agility built in from the start, migration means rebuilding.
THE STRATEGY
How to Address This
Strategically
Five things must work together: find what is out there, give each agent its own credential, tie access to the user not the service account, keep certificates rotating, and make every action provable after the fact.
Discover and Inventory
Scan the full environment and build a CBOM covering every agent credential, API key, algorithm, and issuing CA. Most organizations find agents they did not know about.
Issue Agent Certificates
Each agent gets a short-lived X.509 certificate from an internal CA. It cannot be copied, replayed from a different host, or extended past its expiry.
Scope to the User
PKI-backed OAuth 2.0 on-behalf-of flows limit what the agent can reach to the specific user it is acting for, not the service account it runs under.
Automate the Lifecycle
Enrolment, renewal, and revocation run programmatically with no manual steps. The same CLM platform handles agent credentials and your 47-day TLS certificates.
Produce Signed Records
Every issuance, access event, and revocation goes into a signed, SIEM-exportable record tied to a specific agent, user scope, and policy state at the time.
This is the approach Encryption Consulting takes to securing AI agent identities across enterprise environments.
IAM covers identity, not behaviour. Agents introduce a different threat model, so the answer isn't more IAM policy but cryptographic controls below the reasoning layer. Agents need verifiable, rotating identities and should be managed as first-class cryptographic assets. For organizations already automating certificates and preparing for post-quantum cryptography, the challenge is governance and schema, not tooling.
Products & Services
How We Support
Your Security Journey
CBOM Secure
Cryptographic Discovery & Inventory
Scans your full environment and maps every agent credential, key, algorithm, and issuing CA into an audit-ready Cryptographic Bill of Materials. Every EC agent identity engagement starts here, because governing credentials you have not counted is not governance.
CertSecure Manager
Certificate Lifecycle Management
Handles programmatic enrolment via SCEP, EST, and ACME, issues short-validity certificates for ephemeral agents, renews automatically before expiry, and revokes within seconds of a flag. No manual steps. ABI Research recognized CertSecure Manager as a CLM leader in 2026.
PKI-as-a-Service
Managed Certificate Authority Infrastructure
A fully managed internal PKI running on FIPS 140-2 validated HSMs, designed to issue agent certificates today and ML-DSA certificates when the post-quantum transition arrives. No PKI team needed on your side.
HSM-as-a-Service
FIPS-Validated Key Storage
The CA private key that signs every agent certificate lives inside FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware. If that key is exposed, every certificate it signed is compromised. HSM-as-a-Service closes that risk without on-premises hardware costs.
PQC Advisory Services
RSA and ECDSA certificates protecting your agents today need to migrate to ML-DSA (FIPS 204) and ML-KEM (FIPS 203) before 2030. We build the PKI with that migration already accounted for, so there is no full rebuild when the deadline arrives.
Encryption Advisory Services
If you are not sure which agents are running or where your current IAM falls short, this is where we start. We assess the environment, close the gaps, and hand over a prioritized plan -- not a list of things to figure out on your own.
TRUSTED BY THE FORTUNE 500
4 of 5
Top Global Software Companies4 of 5
Top Financial Services3 of 5
Top Global Ranks3 of 4
Top Energy & UtilitiesWhy Encryption Consulting
Discovery Before Deployment
We run CBOM Secure at the start of every engagement. Most clients find agent credentials they did not know existed. The inventory shapes everything that follows.
One Infrastructure, Three Mandates
The PKI and CLM automation built for agent identity is the same infrastructure the 47-day TLS mandate and the post-quantum migration to ML-DSA require. We plan all three together.
Cryptography-First Expertise
Our practitioners have designed CA hierarchies for large enterprises across financial services, healthcare, and defense. Architecture calls are made by people who have made them before.
Discover Our
Latest Resources
- Blogs
- White Papers
- Videos
Key Management
Transform Static SSH Keys into Short-Lived Workload Identities
Static SSH keys are permanent, unmanaged credentials. Replace them with short-lived, attested workload identities using SSH certificates and SPIFFE/SPIRE.
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White Paper
Post-Quantum Cryptography for Finance: Threats, Standards, and the Road to 2035
Discover the quantum threats, NIST standards, and future of post-quantum cryptography for finance in our comprehensive white paper.
Read more
Video
Decoding Post-Quantum Security on the International Space Station (Part 2) | What It Means For You
Explore expert insights on cybersecurity, PKI, and post-quantum readiness, with practical guidance to strengthen security and future-proof cryptography.
Watch Now
