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.
npx skills add d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook --skill workload-identitygit 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/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/workload-identity)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/workload-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/workload-identity/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/workload-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/workload-identity.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- high Privilege Escalation · line 167 Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 10 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
- medium Agent Snooping · line 10 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 | $0.00086 | $0.03322 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00043 | $0.01661 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00664 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00332 |
Grade A, and why
workload-identity scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 252 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Workload Identity - Playbook
Companion rule: 318-workload-identity.mdc. This skill turns the principles into end-to-end workflows.
Scope: the infrastructure layer of identity. For application-layer agent-on-behalf-of-user delegation, use the Okta skill (${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/okta/SKILL.md) for Cross App Access (XAA) and ID-JAG, and the Zero Trust skill (${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/zero-trust/SKILL.md) for HITL gates and threat models.
When to invoke
Use when the user is:
- Designing service-to-service auth for a Kubernetes platform
- Choosing between SPIFFE/SPIRE and cloud IAM (IRSA, GCP Workload Identity, Azure Managed Identity)
- Deploying SPIRE on EKS / GKE / AKS (or evaluating Red Hat ZTWIM on OpenShift)
- Federating SPIFFE trust domains (multi-cluster, multi-cloud, or cross-org)
- Bridging SPIRE to cloud IAM via OIDC (AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity, GCP WIF, Azure federated credentials)
- Migrating workloads off long-lived secrets, instance profiles, or shared service accounts
- Sizing the operational SLOs for a workload-identity rollout
- Picking between SPIRE topologies (single-cluster, nested, federated, HA)
Golden Rules (anchor every decision)
- Attestation, not credentials. If the design ships a long-lived workload secret, restart.
- Trust domain per environment.
prod,staging,devare separate roots of authority. - Image-digest selectors beat image-tag selectors. Always.
- mTLS proves who. Authorization is separate. Pair with Istio AuthorizationPolicy / OPA / Lattice auth policy.
- TTL in hours for X.509-SVIDs, minutes for JWT-SVIDs. SDK auto-rotates.
- One substrate per workload, but the platform mixes both. SPIFFE for portable / k8s east-west; cloud IAM for cloud-native single-cloud.
- OIDC bridge collapses "give pods cloud creds" to "trust my SPIFFE issuer".
Workflow 1 - Pick SPIFFE vs Cloud IAM
The most common architecture decision in this space.
Steps
- Scope the choice: which workload, which trust boundaries, which clouds, which platforms.
- Score against the dimensions in references/spiffe-vs-cloud-iam.md:
- Portability needed?
- Attestation granularity required (image digest vs cloud role)?
- Operational capacity for SPIRE (HA, CA, observability)?
- Cloud-team IAM depth?
- Service-mesh strategy?
- Default rules:
- Inside one cloud, IAM-deep team, no portability need → cloud IAM (IRSA / VPC Lattice for AWS; Workload Identity for GCP; Managed Identity for Azure)
- Multi-cloud, k8s-heavy, ISV / portable platform → SPIFFE
- Most enterprises: both, segmented by workload class
- Decide and document in an ADR (don't fold this into a generic "design doc" - it's worth its own).
- Plan the OIDC bridge (Workflow 4) if SPIFFE is on one side and cloud creds on the other.
What ships with it
4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 252 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 4bcac9ae47c9
workload-identity is a skill published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (17 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 3,322 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.
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