TELEPORT MACHINE & WORKLOAD IDENTITY
Securing Automation at Scale
Trusted by Market Leaders
No Identity. Full Access. That's Automation.
Most automation isn’t event-driven. It’s always-on. Long-running agents, daemons, and internal systems execute privileged tasks with no real oversight.
Platform and app teams rely on automation to coordinate infrastructure, enforce system state, and eliminate manual work. But they don’t control the identity it uses.
Access is typically carried from earlier stages—inherited from CI pipelines, shared IAM roles, or credentials passed between jobs and systems.
That leaves platform teams unable to isolate what runs, security teams without attribution, and no one accountable for what automation is authorized to do.
Automation acts as a non-human identity, but one that’s passed forward, operates silently, and leaves no clean trail behind. That access is passed between jobs, agents, and environments with no policy guardrails, no attribution, and no expiration:
• Platform teams build orchestrators and agents that span environments—but those systems authenticate as someone else: a CI job, a staging token, or a generic service account.
• Security teams want to enforce policy and understand behavior—but once the task is automated, attribution disappears. Logs show what happened, not whether the system was authorized to act.
• App teams rely on bots, daemons, and internal services to move fast—but those systems inherit access that persists beyond the job with broad standing privileges
Secrets get embedded in runners. IAM roles are shared between systems. And ephemeral jobs trigger actions on behalf of others—with no audit trail and no session identity.
And when something goes wrong, there’s no way to trace what system acted—or whether it should have had access in the first place.
Most teams still treat automation as an extension of CI/CD. The jobs are scheduled. The scripts are tested. The systems work—until one of them doesn’t.
Platform teams try to contain jobs with runner-level guardrails, but once the task is handed off to a bot or agent, enforcement ends. Security teams track the CI job that started it—but lose visibility into what the automated system actually did, or whether it was authorized to act. App teams wire together internal services, daemons, and background jobs—without knowing they’re passing along inherited access that lives far beyond the task it was meant for.
The automation succeeds. The security breaks downstream. And by the time anyone notices, the system that triggered it has already disappeared—or never carried identity to begin with.
Real-World Incident
An internal agent leaked a GitHub token. That token triggered unauthorized updates across 23,000+ repositories. No one noticed. Because the agent wasn’t behaving maliciously—it was just running with credentials it inherited from CI, which carried broad permissions.
It wasn’t an exploit: there was no enforcement point, and no runtime identity, and therefore, no record of what triggered what—or whether it was authorized to act.
The Solution: Infrastructure Identity
Infrastructure Identity treats automation as a first-class actor—issuing identity at the moment it runs, tied to what it is, where it came from, and what it’s authorized to do.
Instead of passing credentials or assuming inherited trust, each system receives cryptographic identity issued at runtime, authorized only for its task, and short-lived by design.
No more orphaned access. No more background jobs acting without context. Just automation with identity—issued when it acts, and governed from start to finish.
Why It's Different
Most access models treat automation as an extension of something else—relying on the job that scheduled it or the credential it inherits.
Teleport treats automation as an actor in its own right. It receives identity at the moment it acts—cryptographically verified as originating from the system performing the task, short-lived by design, and authorized only for what it’s meant to do.
No handoffs. No inherited access. No static credentials.
How It Works
When an automated system—like an agent, orchestrator, or internal service—executes a task, it requests a cryptographic identity from Teleport—instantiated at runtime and with attestation tied to the system itself, the task it’s performing, and the trigger that initiated it.
That identity is:
Requested by the system itself, not carried from an earlier stage or provisioned by a CI job
Authorized only for the specific task it performs, not passed across workflows or shared between agents
Ephemeral by design, so there’s no long-lived access to rotate, expire, or revoke
Attributed to both the trigger and the actor, so teams know what initiated the task and what system actually ran it
Isolated from other systems by design, so identity doesn’t sprawl between agents, services, or environments
Instead of passing credentials between systems, each job or agent runs with identity issued in real time—authorized only for its task, and short-lived by design.
Infrastructure Identity turns automation from a black box into a governed system—so teams can run automation with confidence, without losing track of who’s running it.
Automation runs your infrastructure.
Now, it scales securely.
With Infrastructure Identity, automation no longer operates without guardrails. It runs with identity issued at execution—cryptographically verified and linked to the system acting, short-lived by design, and authorized only for what it’s meant to do.
• Platform teams orchestrate tasks across systems without leaking credentials or managing manual access paths.
• App teams can rely on automation safely—without inheriting access that outlives the job.
• Security teams enforce policy per system and gain job-level audit across automated workflows.
Automation already runs your infrastructure. Infrastructure Identity is what makes it safe to scale.
Automation is the New Attack Surface
Securing Non-Human Identities (NHIs) at the Infrastructure Layer
Modern infrastructure moves fast. Automation now powers nearly every critical system — from provisioning environments with code, to deploying software through pipelines, to scaling workloads across distributed services and AI agents.
But beneath that velocity lies an expanding layer of risk that’s often invisible: non-human identities (NHI). Download this paper to learn more.
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More Machine & Workload Identity Use Cases
Secure CI/CD Pipelines
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Streamline IaC Deployments
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Multi-Cloud Workloads
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Automation at Scale
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Ready to Teleport?
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Additional Resources
Press Release
Introducing Teleport Machine & Workload Identity
Teleport, the Infrastructure Identity Company, today announced the introduction of Teleport Machine & Workload Identity, a breakthrough solution that provides seamless authentication, authorization, and access control for non-human identities across modern infrastructure environments.
Teleport Resources
Teleport Workload Identity with SPIFFE
Watch this deep dive into Teleport Workload Identity with SPIFFE, where we explore how to secure inter-service communication with cryptographic workload identities. Learn how to eliminate static credentials, enforce least-privilege access, and achieve zero-trust security for modern infrastructure.
Teleport Documentation
Teleport Machine & Workload Identity Documentation
Learn how to secure your workloads with cryptographic identity. Explore the Teleport Machine and Workload Identity developer documentation.