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Machine and signing identity

Machine identities outnumber humans by an order of magnitude and almost none has a human behind it. These essays cover ownership, revocation latency, federation and signing authority.

Start here Human-agent delegation is the reference piece behind this topic.

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Eighty machine identities per human, and not one has a signature behind it

Machine identity programmes end with a spreadsheet of thousands of identities whose owner field holds a team name, a leaver, or nothing.
Developer

After the 2026 certificate authority compromise: signing authority is not key custody

A 2026 certificate authority compromise produced stolen code-signing certificates. Hardware key storage improved custody, not authority.
Developer

Agent-to-agent delegation depth: where enterprise authority should stop

A human approves an agent, which spawns sub-agents, which invoke tools. By hop four the authority has no recognisable relation to the approval.
Developer

Ninety-one percent of leaked secrets still work five days later

Security programmes measure rotation cadence. Attackers measure time-to-exploit, which is minutes. The gap is where credential incidents live.
Developer

Third-party OAuth consent: the integration somebody approved in 2023

An admin approved a third-party app's tenant-wide access years ago. The grant persists, the scopes were never re-examined, the approver may have left.
Developer

The engineer left; the integration did not

Offboarding disables an account and reclaims a laptop. It does not touch the tokens, keys, webhooks and service accounts the leaver created.
Developer

The enterprise MCP registry: governing which tools an agent may ever call

An agent's capability is the union of the tools it can reach. Enterprises assemble tool catalogues with no record of who approved each one.
Developer

Workload identity federation: removing the secret without removing the question

Federation removes the static secret, which is a real improvement. The trust policy deciding which branch may assume a powerful role remains.

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