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Choose the authority model before you compare agent or proxy features. If an action must stay within a signed-in person’s permissions, use delegated authorization such as OAuth on-behalf-of (OBO). If work runs without that person—on a schedule, in infrastructure, or between services—give it a separately governed application, workload, managed, or service identity. A proxy can enforce policy at the boundary, but routing requests through a proxy does not create identity, delegation, or authorization by itself.
The decision in one sentence
Ask who is ultimately authorized to act: a person, an organization-wide application, or a narrowly bounded workload. Then select an identity pattern that proves that authority, carries only the required permissions, and can be revoked and audited. Put a deterministic policy decision and enforcement layer in front of every tool or resource, whether the request comes directly from an agent or through a proxy.
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This order matters because feature comparisons can hide the most consequential design choice. A proxy may offer routing, filtering, rate limits, or a convenient control plane, while an agent platform may advertise tool catalogs and autonomous execution. None of those features answers whose permissions are being used, who is accountable for the result, or what happens when a token, prompt, tenant identifier, or tool configuration is wrong.
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NIST’s guidance treats an agent as a first-class security entity: it needs a unique identifier, credentials, and entitlements bound to the identity of the user or system operating it. Shared credentials erase that relationship. If several agents or operators use one account, an audit record can show that account without proving which workload acted, which person initiated it, or which policy allowed the operation.
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Identity is therefore the foundation for three separate questions:
- Authentication: Which person, application, or workload is making this request?
- Authorization: What is that subject allowed to do, on which resources, under which conditions?
- Accountability: Can an investigator reconstruct the user request, agent decision, policy result, tool call, resource, and outcome?
Delegated credentials answer those questions in a user context. Workload or application credentials answer them for autonomous work. A proxy can evaluate and enforce the decision, but it cannot safely substitute for the subject whose authority is being evaluated.
Choose the authority source
Delegated authorization for user-scoped work
Use delegated access when a person is the ultimate authority and the agent must stay within that person’s existing rights. An OAuth/OBO flow carries the user context to a downstream service instead of replacing it with a broad, shared account. The resulting access should identify the user, the calling application or agent, the intended audience, and the permitted scopes.
This pattern fits an assistant that searches a user’s documents, prepares a change for that user’s approval, or performs an operation the user is already entitled to perform. A request should fail when the user lacks the underlying resource permission, even if the agent itself has a large tool catalog.
- Use short-lived, audience-restricted tokens where the platform supports them.
- Request only the scopes needed for the current tool operation.
- Preserve the delegation chain in logs: user, client, agent instance, policy decision, tool, resource, and result.
- Recheck authorization before sensitive or state-changing operations rather than trusting an earlier model decision.
App-only, managed, service-principal, or workload identity
Use an independently governed identity when work must continue without a signed-in user. Examples include scheduled processing, infrastructure automation, monitoring, queue consumers, and service-to-service calls. The identity belongs to the application or workload, not to whichever operator happened to deploy it.
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Because no user permission automatically constrains the action, the workload identity must be bounded explicitly. Assign the smallest useful resource permissions, restrict the audience and environment, issue credentials dynamically where possible, and make revocation and rotation operationally routine. Attestation or secure credential issuance can add confidence that the credential is being used by the intended workload.
Hybrid workflows
Many real systems need both patterns. An agent may read a person’s project data with delegated access while writing execution status to an agent-owned store with workload identity. Keep those authorities separate. Do not give the user token access to infrastructure telemetry, and do not let the agent’s background identity silently inherit the user’s entire data estate.
Document the boundary for each operation: which identity is presented to which resource, which authority is being exercised, and whether a human approval is required. A single conversation can legitimately produce several differently authorized tool calls.
| Pattern | Ultimate authority | Typical use | Primary control | Failure risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delegated/OBO | Signed-in user | User data, user-approved actions, interactive assistance | Token carries user and client context; resource enforces user rights | Agent obtains scopes broader than the user’s task or retains stale delegation |
| App-only or service identity | Organization or application owner | Background jobs and API-to-API operations | Explicit role assignments, audience limits, rotation and revocation | Long-lived or overbroad permissions create a large blast radius |
| Managed/workload identity | Bounded runtime or workload | Cloud or infrastructure services | Platform-issued identity tied to workload, environment, and lifecycle | Compromised runtime can use every permission assigned to it |
| Hybrid | User for some resources; workload for others | Assistants that handle user data and agent-owned state | Separate credentials and policy per resource and operation | Confusing the two chains causes accidental privilege escalation |
What a proxy does—and does not do
In NIST Zero Trust architecture, a policy decision point (PDP) evaluates a request and a policy enforcement point (PEP) allows, denies, limits, or revokes access. A proxy can implement or host those functions. It can require a particular token audience, check tenant and resource context, limit tools, apply rate or approval rules, and stop a call before it reaches a downstream service.
Proxying is not authorization by itself. A router that forwards every request, or a gateway that authenticates only its own connection, has not established that the original user or workload is entitled to the target resource. The proxy needs reliable identity and delegation context, deterministic policy logic, and a resource-side control that does not blindly trust an unverified header.
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Use a proxy as an enforcement point when you need centralized controls across many agents and tools. Keep identity issuance and resource authorization independent so that bypassing the proxy, misconfiguring a route, or compromising the proxy does not automatically grant unrestricted access.
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- Name the ultimate authority. Write down whether the action is authorized by a person, an organization-wide application, or a bounded workload. If the answer changes by operation, split the operations rather than forcing one identity pattern.
- Select the identity pattern. Choose delegated/OBO for user-constrained actions. Choose app-only, managed, service-principal, or workload identity for background and infrastructure work. Use separate identities in hybrid workflows.
- Bind authority to context. Carry tenant, resource, tool, operation, scope, expiry, audience, and delegation-chain information. Prefer short-lived and sender-constrained credentials where supported.
- Place enforcement before execution. A deterministic policy layer should evaluate the subject, tenant, agent, tool, operation type, target resource, role, and scope before the tool runs. The model can propose an action; it must not be the final authorization mechanism.
- Apply least privilege per tool. Give a read-only search tool read scopes, a ticket-creation tool only the fields and queues it needs, and a deployment tool access only to its approved environment. Avoid one universal token for an entire tool catalog.
- Define approval boundaries. Require explicit human approval, dual control, or a narrower workflow for destructive, financial, externally visible, or production changes. Record the approval as part of the authorization event.
- Test the failure boundary. Simulate leaked tokens, missing tenant IDs, expired delegation, prompt requests outside scope, and a tool changing from read to write. The expected result should be denial, limitation, reauthentication, or approval—not a best-effort model response.
Scope every tool and preserve the audit trail
Least privilege is easier to enforce when tools have explicit contracts. For each tool, define accepted identity types, allowed operations, resources, fields, environments, rate limits, and approval requirements. A policy check should evaluate those attributes from trusted context, not from text supplied by the model or user.
Microsoft’s implementation guidance describes the policy layer as the deterministic part of the system and recommends running it before tool execution. That layer should make a repeatable decision even when the prompt is ambiguous or adversarial. It should also return a reason that operators can investigate without exposing secrets.
Log enough context to reconstruct the event without relying on a transcript alone. A useful record connects:
- the original user request or scheduled trigger;
- the authenticated user, application, or workload;
- the agent version and instance;
- the tenant and target resource;
- the tool and operation type;
- the scopes, role, audience, expiry, and delegation chain presented;
- the policy inputs and allow, deny, limit, or approval result;
- the downstream response and final outcome.
Protect these logs from alteration and keep correlation identifiers consistent across the proxy, policy service, agent runtime, and resource. Logging a generic “agent called API” event is not enough for non-repudiation.
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Compare architectures on fixed security axes
Once authority is clear, compare implementations using the same questions. Marketing labels such as “agent gateway” or “secure proxy” do not answer them.
| Axis | Governed agent or workload identity | Proxy or centralized enforcement | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary role | Proves which workload is acting and carries bounded authority | Evaluates and enforces requests before they reach a resource | Where is identity established, and where is the final allow/deny decision made? |
| Best fit | Autonomous jobs, infrastructure, service-to-service calls | Central policy, tool mediation, tenant and context checks | Does the design need one control point or independent workload accountability? |
| Main risk | Overbroad, long-lived, or poorly isolated permissions | False confidence that routing alone supplies authorization | What happens if the identity or proxy is compromised? |
| Required companion controls | Least privilege, expiry, secure issuance or attestation, audit | Reliable identity context, policy logic, resource-side enforcement, audit | Can a request bypass the control, and will the resource reject it? |
| Revocation | Disable the workload, rotate credentials, remove role assignments | Revoke policy, token, route, or session conditions | How quickly does each layer stop an active credential? |
| Tenant isolation | Separate identities, audiences, and resource bindings | Validate tenant on every request and prevent cross-tenant routing | Is tenant context taken from a trusted claim or user-supplied parameter? |
| Operational burden | Lifecycle, rotation, deployment identity, permissions and attestation | Policy authoring, availability, latency, bypass protection and logging | Who owns failures and emergency changes? |
| Audit and non-repudiation | Strong workload identity and credential provenance | Correlated decision and enforcement records | Can you prove both who acted and why the action was allowed? |
A reference request flow
A defensible design separates proposal, authorization, and execution:
- The user or scheduler creates a request. The entry point authenticates the subject and assigns a correlation identifier.
- The agent interprets the request and proposes a specific tool, operation, resource, and parameters. The proposal is untrusted input to policy.
- The policy service validates the identity or delegation chain, tenant, audience, scope, tool contract, resource, operation, expiry, and approval state.
- The enforcement point allows, denies, limits, or pauses the call. If allowed, it forwards only the approved operation and context.
- The target resource performs its own authorization check. It should reject an invalid or overbroad token even if the proxy made a mistake.
- The system records the decision, downstream result, and any human approval or revocation event.
For user-scoped data, the forwarded credential should preserve the user’s rights. For agent-owned telemetry or scheduled processing, the call should use the workload identity. Do not convert one into the other merely to simplify implementation.
Failure boundaries you should test
| Scenario | Unsafe behavior | Expected control response |
|---|---|---|
| Token leaks | Attacker reuses a long-lived token against every tool | Short expiry, narrow audience and scopes, sender constraints where available, rapid revocation and anomaly detection |
| Prompt requests an out-of-scope action | Agent follows the instruction because it sounds urgent | Deterministic policy denies or requires approval; model output cannot expand authority |
| Tenant identifier is missing or altered | Proxy guesses a default tenant or trusts a request parameter | Reject the call until tenant context comes from a verified identity and resource binding |
| Tool changes from read to write | Existing search permission is reused for mutation | Classify operation type separately and require a write scope and any approval |
| Delegation expires mid-workflow | Agent retries indefinitely or falls back to an app-wide credential | Stop, report expiration, and obtain fresh delegated authorization or an explicit alternate workflow |
| Proxy is bypassed | Direct resource access succeeds with a copied route or header | Resource validates tokens and policy claims independently; network placement is not the only control |
Tenant separation and context integrity
Multi-tenant agents need tenant isolation at identity, policy, storage, and execution layers. A tenant value in a prompt, URL, or tool argument is not proof of tenancy. Derive tenant context from a verified claim or an explicitly bound resource identifier, then check that the subject, agent, and target all belong to an allowed relationship.
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Standards as building blocks, not a complete design
NIST’s NCCoE concept paper identifies OAuth and OpenID Connect for authorization and identity, SPIFFE/SPIRE for workload identity, SCIM for identity lifecycle, and NGAC for policy-based access control among relevant building blocks. The NCCoE work is developing implementation guidance, so it should be treated as emerging project guidance rather than a finalized universal standard.
These technologies solve different problems. OAuth carries delegated authorization; OpenID Connect conveys authenticated identity claims; SPIFFE/SPIRE can provide workload identities; SCIM helps provision and deprovision identities; and NGAC represents policy relationships. None removes the need to define tool scopes, tenant boundaries, approval rules, resource checks, and audit records.
Implementation checklist
- Inventory every agent, tool, resource, tenant boundary, and background job.
- For each operation, name the ultimate authority and choose delegated, workload, or hybrid identity.
- Define a unique identity and lifecycle owner for every agent or workload; prohibit shared credentials.
- Write tool contracts with operation type, resource, scope, audience, environment, approval, and expiry requirements.
- Deploy a policy decision and enforcement path before tool execution.
- Make downstream resources validate identity and authorization independently of the proxy.
- Use short-lived, narrowly scoped credentials and document rotation and emergency revocation.
- Separate user data access from agent-owned state and telemetry.
- Correlate user or trigger, agent, policy, tool, resource, and outcome in tamper-resistant logs.
- Run negative tests for leakage, prompt injection, cross-tenant requests, missing context, scope changes, bypass attempts, and expired delegation.
- Review permissions after every new tool, resource, model, deployment environment, or workflow change.
Common design mistakes
Giving the agent the operator’s permanent credentials
This makes convenience look like delegation while removing expiry, separation, and reliable attribution. Use a real delegated flow for user work or a separately governed workload identity for autonomous work.
Assuming a gateway is a security boundary by itself
A gateway that only routes traffic cannot decide whether the subject may access the resource. Pair it with a PDP/PEP policy path, trusted identity context, and resource-side enforcement.
Using one broad token for every tool
Universal tokens turn a prompt mistake or tool compromise into an organization-wide incident. Issue scopes and audiences per tool and operation, and make write access distinct from read access.
Letting the model make the final authorization decision
Models can interpret intent, but they are not deterministic policy engines. Treat their proposed action as input to a pre-execution check that can deny, limit, or require approval.
Logging only the final API result
A success or failure code does not show who initiated the action, which identity was used, or why policy allowed it. Correlate the complete chain so operators can investigate and revoke precisely.
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If a person’s permissions should constrain the action, use delegated authorization and preserve that user context through policy and resource checks. If the work is autonomous or infrastructural, use a separately governed workload or application identity with explicit least privilege. Add a proxy when you need centralized, deterministic enforcement—but never treat the proxy as a replacement for identity, delegation, or authorization.
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