Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbookWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/318-workload-identity)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/318-workload-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/318-workload-identity.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00044 | $0.04997 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00022 | $0.02499 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00009 | $0.00999 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00500 |
Grade A, and why
318-workload-identity scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 413 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Workload Identity (SPIFFE, SPIRE, Cloud IAM Federation)
Audience: engineers designing or operating service-to-service authentication for Kubernetes, multi-cloud, or AI-agent platforms.
Scope: the infrastructure layer of identity - "is this workload allowed to call that workload?" For the application layer ("is this app/agent allowed to call that app on behalf of this user?") see the Okta XAA / ID-JAG section in 317-okta.mdc.
[!IMPORTANT] This rule complements:
316-zero-trust.mdc- principles (always-on)315-iam.mdc- protocol reference (OIDC/SAML/PKCE/PKI)412-aws-iam.mdc- AWS IAM specifics (IRSA, Pod Identity, VPC Lattice)317-okta.mdc- Okta Workforce Identity (incl. XAA)450-kubernetes.mdc- Kubernetes patterns (incl. service mesh)
The single most important idea
The pivot from credential-based to attestation-based workload identity.
| Credential-based | Attestation-based | |
|---|---|---|
| Trust basis | "I hold this secret" | "The platform cryptographically proves what I am, every time I ask" |
| Failure mode | Secret leaks → breach | No long-lived secret to leak |
| Rotation | Manual or scheduled | Continuous, automated |
| Examples | Static API key, long-lived OAuth token, baked-in cert | SPIFFE SVID, IRSA-vended STS creds, GCP Workload Identity, Azure Managed Identity |
Every major lateral-movement breach of the last five years - SolarWinds, CircleCI (Jan 2023), Imperva, Okta support portal, Microsoft Midnight Blizzard, Salesloft Drift - had a workload credential at the root. The pattern is always the same: a credential outlived its purpose, was over-scoped, or was never tied to a verifiable workload identity in the first place.
Rule: if your design includes a long-lived workload secret, you have not designed Zero Trust.
Identity stack mental model
| Layer | Who/what | Maturity | Primary primitives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human | Employees, customers, partners | Mature | OIDC, SAML, WebAuthn/passkeys, MFA, SSO |
| Device | Laptops, phones, servers | Progressing | mTLS client certs, TPM, device posture, MDM |
| Workload | Services, containers, functions, agents | Fastest-growing, least mature | SPIFFE/SPIRE, cloud IAM (IRSA / Workload Identity / Managed Identity), OIDC workload federation |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 7d ago First seen · 413 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 336c520bbaf0
318-workload-identity is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (16 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 4,997 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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