GCP Identity Design

GCP Identity Design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from niels-emmer/myace. It costs 34 tokens per session (861 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to choosing Google Cloud IAM roles, service accounts, and identity federation for workloads, automated pipelines, and people.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or reviewing authentication for GCP services, service-to-service calls, CI/CD pipelines, or human access.
Why use it?
It helps limit access and avoid long-lived service-account keys, which are credentials that can remain valid after they should have been replaced.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for aider. Also seen: mentions Codex; built for aider; mentions OpenCode.

Good fit Use it when designing or reviewing authentication for GCP services, service-to-service calls, CI/CD pipelines, or human access.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity
Install

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.

Any agent
npx skills add niels-emmer/myace --skill gcp-identity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/niels-emmer/myace

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for GCP Identity Design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-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.

agentmods 80×15 button for GCP Identity Design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/niels-emmer/myace/gcp-identity.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 861 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00034 $0.00861
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00430
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00172
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00086

Measured 8d ago against content hash 3fc51bb35b4f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

GCP Identity Design 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 8d 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.

collections/additional/gcp/skills/gcp-identity/SKILL.md · 75 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 75 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Identity is the security boundary in GCP. This skill is the GCP-specific companion to iac-expert's "Managed Identity Over Long-Lived Secrets" rule: it explains the identity options GCP offers, when to use each, and how to design so that long-lived service-account keys are the exception, not the default.

When to use it

Any time you're designing or reviewing how a GCP workload authenticates — a new service, a service-to-service call, a CI/CD pipeline deploying to GCP, or a human accessing the console/CLI.

The identity options, and when to use each

Service accounts — the default for any GCP-hosted workload (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, etc.). Attach a service account to the resource and GCP handles the backing credentials automatically; your code just requests temporary credentials via the instance metadata/Workload Identity endpoint. Use this for service-to-service access between GCP resources. Prefer a service account with a narrowly-scoped IAM role over a shared account with broad permissions.

Workload Identity Federation — for non-GCP or external workloads (a GitHub Actions workflow, a Kubernetes cluster outside GCP, a third-party SaaS) that need to act as a GCP identity. Configure a Workload Identity Pool and Provider so the external workload's OIDC token (e.g. GitHub Actions OIDC) is trusted directly — no service-account key exchanged. This is the modern replacement for long-lived service-account keys in CI/CD.

Long-lived service-account keys — the legacy option. Only acceptable when the target genuinely has no service-account or federation option. If you must use one: store the key in Secret Manager, reference it by ID, scope its IAM role to least privilege, and rotate it on a short, documented cadence. Treat any new service-account key as a documented exception per iac-expert's exception-documentation skill.

Human access — IAM users/groups with MFA, or (better) identity federation to a corporate IdP (Google Workspace / Cloud Identity SSO). No shared accounts, no standing service-account keys in code or config. Use just-in-time access to roles rather than permanent standing credentials.

Read the full file on GitHub · 75 lines

Changes

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.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 75 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 3fc51bb35b4f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

GCP Identity Design is a skill published in the GitHub repository niels-emmer/myace (1 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 861 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 2026-09-03.