Agentic Identity Broker, OAuth Delegation for AI Agents
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Hi HN, I’m Jan. I am co-author of the Agentic Identity Broker (AIB), an MIT-licensed OAuth2 broker in the Zalando Incubator, that lets a user give an AI agent scoped, revocable access to MCP services.The broker solves three major challenges that are especially relevant in corporate environments: (A) Enable users to delegate workloads to agents without providing the agents all the user’s tokens. (B) Connect fragmented identity and authorization systems. (C) Centralize tool approvals and audit logging.We built AIB to fill an infrastructure gap in our own agent platform. At this moment in time, IETF working groups are still finalizing standards for agent identity, and vendors are still turning the necessary infrastructure into off-the-shelf products. We needed that infrastructure today.How it works: the user consents once per agent and service. The broker stores the third-party tokens encrypted. At request time a gateway (e.g. Agentgateway) does RFC 8693 token exchange. Agents never see user tokens and MCP servers only implement tools and don’t need to care about all the OAuth 2.1 plumbing.AIB is v0.1 and runs in production, bringing together hundreds of our agents with dozens of internal and external MCP servers.To try it locally: clone the repo, run "just compose-up-detached".The current features focus on on-behalf-of (OBO) use cases, where human actors delegate to agents. Next we are looking to also support headless agents, where agents are invoked by machines. Intent-based authorization is yet another package on our roadmap. If you’ve built either, or have feedback on the UI/UX, I’d like to hear from you!
HN · launched Nov 6, 2026 · 24 upvotes (top 26%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent security and monitoring tools · 297 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -44% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Model & infra
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 297 launches in ai agent security and monitoring tools →
Could you build this?
Partial The OAuth2 broker, token scoping, and revocation can be assembled from existing libraries with AI help, but a security-critical auth system needs expert design and review that vibe coding does not reliably provide.
What it would actually take: Build on an OAuth2 authorization server library or framework (for example, Keycloak or a Go/Python OAuth library) with a token-exchange layer that issues short-lived, scoped, revocable tokens for MCP services. The hard parts are threat modeling, correct PKCE/token-exchange handling, secure secret storage, and revocation propagation, which need security engineering experience and an audit before real use.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Why OAuth delegation isn't enough, Mainly enterprise, or useful for smaller teams?, Unclear day-to-day use cases, Explains how more than why, How it handles transitive cases
Feature requests: Clearer explanation of the problem being solved
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 1639 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #514 of 1640 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 371 days after the earliest competitor.
- Agent Passport · hn · 2026-02-21 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini · hn · 2026-02-18 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Clay Seal Identity · hn · 2026-07-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Agent Vault · hn · 2026-04-22 · 156 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- agentsentinel · ph · 2026-11-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- TotalHeal AgentGate · ph · 2026-11-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- ai-agent-gateway · github · 2026-10-01 · 59 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Latchkey · hn · 2026-02-03 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.50
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