TELEPORT MACHINE & WORKLOAD IDENTITY
Streamline IaC Deployments
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Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Changed Infrastructure Speed. Now It Needs Infrastructure Identity.
Platform and app teams use Infrastructure-as-Code to ship infrastructure faster, more repeatably, and at scale. But access in these workflows is still embedded statically—pre-assigned to jobs, passed between stages, and disconnected from the system that executes the change.
Teams inject cloud credentials, assign persistent IAM roles, and pass access through pipelines with no runtime control or expiration.
The tools may look declarative, but the access behind them isn’t. IaC pipelines are some of the most powerful automation in the stack—yet they often run with more access than the people who wrote them. Once a job runs, no one can say who provisioned the credentials, why they were granted, or whether the job was authorized to act at all.
This results in a tradeoff that expands risk as fast as it delivers speed: automate with brittle secrets, hardcoded tokens, or persistent IAM roles, or wait for someone else to inject access, rotate secrets, or pre-approve every change. Both paths come at a cost: either velocity slows, or blast radius grows.
This friction shows up across every team:
• Platform teams want to enforce least privilege and isolate environments. But without job-level identity or runtime enforcement, they’re stuck maintaining long-lived roles across systems.
• App teams want to deploy infrastructure autonomously, but inherit global IAM access—or get blocked waiting for credentials.
• Security teams want attribution and control, but the logs don’t show who initiated a change—only that a credential was accepted.
Even in tightly managed environments, infrastructure is still changed by systems that authenticate without identity, operate without execution guardrails, and leave no record of who was authorized to act, or what they were permitted to do.
Teams spend hours getting Terraform modules and pipeline configs right—but when the job runs, it still uses credentials issued days earlier, provisioned for a different context, and never tied to that specific execution.
The Platform team knows the access is technically valid. The Security team knows it’s over-permissioned. And no one can say which system triggered the change—or whether it was authorized to make it.
Most pipelines still operate on inherited access: no session boundary, no expiration, and no identity attached to what actually ran.
Real-World Incident
A single misconfigured CLI leaked a cloud token. The problem wasn’t just the leak—it was that the same token worked in both staging and production. It wasn’t tied to a job, team, or environment. Nothing validated whether it belonged there. So when it leaked, it was valid everywhere—and no logs could say who actually triggered what. There was no exploit. It was a structural failure: automation ran with too much access and operated anonymously, without attestation to the system that acted.
The Solution: Infrastructure Identity
Infrastructure Identity gives each infrastructure deployment its own short-lived identity, instantiated by the job, authorized only for what it is meant to do, and short-lived by design.
Instead of provisioning credentials in advance, identity is issued at runtime with attestation to the execution context that triggered the change.
Why It's Different
Most IaC security strategies try to manage static credentials more safely—rotating secrets, limiting token lifespan, or integrating Vault workflows.
Teleport removes static credentials from the execution path entirely by issuing cryptographic identity at runtime.
Identity is instantiated by the execution context—what triggered it, where it’s running, and what it’s authorized to change.
This eliminates the operational overhead of secret provisioning and the architectural risk of overpermissioned automation.
How It Works
When a Terraform plan runs, a Pulumi job executes, or an Ansible playbook applies a change, Teleport issues a cryptographic identity at runtime—with attestation to the system performing the change, the environment it targets, and the job or pipeline that triggered it. That identity:
Is instantiated by a runtime trigger, like a pipeline ID, Git tag, or deployment workflow that initiated the job
Has attestation back to the platform applying the change, eliminating anonymous actions from upstream pipelines or credentials hardcoded in provider configs
Is authorized only for the specific resource and environment it’s modifying, preventing lateral actions on other jobs or stages
Is short-lived, expiring automatically when the job completes—no credential revocation or manual cleanup required
Is auditable end-to-end, so teams can trace who triggered the job, what tool applied the change, and what access was used
Every IaC execution becomes authorized only for its task,, attributable, and governed from the moment it runs.
Identity becomes part of the deployment workflow—so infrastructure can move fast without expanding the attack surface.
Every infrastructure change becomes attributable, limited in duration, and governed by design.
Infrastructure Identity brings real-time identity enforcement to infastructure jobs—reducing access sprawl while accelerating team velocity.
• Platform teams no longer need to inject credentials or write glue code to manage secrets. No more juggling Terraform IAM roles or maintaining brittle credential workflows.
• App teams can deploy infrastructure independently—without inheriting global access or waiting for manual approvals.
• Security teams gain a complete, execution-level audit trail backed by ephemeral identity that expires when the job ends. No more reconstructing context after the fact.
Teleport reduces friction across the board:
• Fewer handoffs and fewer breakages in IaC workflows
• No static secrets to manage, rotate, or expose
• Faster incident response with job-level attribution built in
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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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.