Risk
Inherited Identity Sprawl
Description
Agents operate using a delegating user's identity instead of a dedicated workload identity, causing sprawl of human identities used by non-human actors and breaking least-privilege boundaries.
Example
A coding agent acts under the developer's full SSO identity (with all their access), rather than a scoped workload identity for the agent.
Assets Affected
Agent Identity
AI Agent
AI Provider Access Credentials
Mitigation
- Issue workload identities for service-side agents
- use scoped tokens with explicit lifetimes for endpoint agents
- prohibit shared identities
- periodically audit human-to-agent identity mappings.
Standards Mapping
- ISO: A.4.5, A.4.6
- OWASP agentic: ASI03
- OWASP LLM: LLM06:2025
- EU AI Act: Art. 15(5)
- DASF: Agents-Core 13.3, Agents-MCP Server 13.17
- AIUC-1: B007