Why agent fabrics and registries are central to AI identity security

The age of agentic AI is here — and it’s changing everything about how we secure identity.

As AI agents begin to perform sensitive tasks once reserved for humans — from making purchases to deploying code — they must be treated as first-class citizens in the enterprise identity architecture. But giving an agent identity is just the beginning.

To manage agents at scale, with the same rigor and security controls as human users, enterprises need a new layer: the agent fabric.

What is an agent fabric?

An agent fabric is an identity security control plane purpose-built for AI agents. It’s a programmatic environment to:

• Discover agents dynamically as they spin up and down.
• Organize agents by policy (e.g., function, purpose, or business unit).
• Categorize by risk based on their scopes, capabilities, or origin.
• Audit agent OAuth scopes to identify over-permissioned behaviors.
• Associate agent identity in an IDP — linking runtime behavior to a verifiable identity object.

An agent fabric answers a critical gap in today’s AI infrastructure: AI agents don’t live in a single system. They span LLM frameworks, API runtimes, CI/CD environments, and cloud-native services, with no centralized way to manage identity.

The agent fabric solves this by acting as a unifying layer across platforms.

Agent fabric vs. identity fabric vs. app fabric

To understand where the agent fabric fits, consider the full stack of identity abstraction layers:

These three fabrics come together via Identity Orchestration — the glue that makes runtime identity management dynamic and programmable. For years, orchestration linked humans and apps. Now, it also includes AI agents as runtime actors.

When done right, Identity Orchestration brings:

• Runtime policy enforcement across apps, users, and agents.
• Unified logging and audit trails across human and non-human identities.
• Zero Trust enforcement for every action — regardless of whether it’s triggered by a user or an autonomous agent.

Analyst take: a new identity layer for a new paradigm

Leading analysts like Gartner and KuppingerCole are already calling attention to the rise of identity fabrics — and the need to extend them beyond human identities.

Gartner defines identity fabrics as the next generation of IAM architecture, designed for distributed trust, adaptive access, and dynamic enforcement across hybrid and multi-cloud. In the agent era, this vision must now include:

• Autonomous agents operating in external clouds.
• Multi-step workflows are distributed across federated services.
• Fine-grained delegation with auditability and traceability.

That’s the role of the agent fabric — to extend identity fabric principles to agent-based systems.

Inside the agent fabric registry

At the heart of any agent fabric is a registry — a source of truth for agent metadata, identity bindings, and security posture.

What the agent fabric Registry Tracks:

• Agent identity in an IDP (e.g., Entra, Okta, CyberArk, Descope, Transmit)
• Scopes and permissions granted to each agent
• Intent and function (e.g., “purchase assistant” or “build bot”)
• Time-to-live (TTL) and revocation information
• Audit trails for what the agent has done and on whose behalf
• Risk levels based on behavior, scopes, and sensitivity

Without this registry, agent activity is invisible. Shadow agents with privileged scopes become a major risk vector — especially as LLM-based agents become integrated with sensitive systems like CRM, payments, or DevOps pipelines.

Distributed trust at scale

Enterprise AI agent systems are no longer confined to one environment. Your AI ecosystem might span:

• ChatGPT in Azure, authenticated via Entra
• LangChain in AWS, with SPIFFE-based identities
• CrewAI agents on-premises, running with PKCE
• Open-source agents embedded in CI/CD, deployed via GitHub Actions

In this world, trust must be distributed but enforceable.

The agent fabric supports federated identity models, connecting agents across:

• Multiple clouds (Azure, AWS, GCP)
• Multiple IDPs (Okta, Entra, Auth0, Keycloak)
• Different platforms (LLM tools, agent frameworks, container systems)

Just like the identity fabric federates human authentication across providers, the agent fabric federates agent identity across platforms — and enforces consistent policies, scopes, and audit rules.

Public vs. private registries

Depending on your architecture, the agent fabric registry may be:

• Private: Run on-premises or in a private cloud, with tight integration to internal IDPs and zero-trust policy engines (ideal for regulated industries).
• Public: Shared registries hosted by vendors or cloud providers (e.g., Azure Agent Foundry or GCP’s Workload Identity Pool).

Either way, the agent fabric becomes the interoperability layer between distributed agents and your internal security policies.

Why this matters now

In the next two years, enterprises will see 80x more agents than human users across their environments. These agents will:

• Access production APIs
• Store customer data
• Act on behalf of users

And they will often do so without proper authentication, governance, or oversight.

The agent fabric is not a luxury — it’s a requirement for operating agentic systems safely, at scale, and in compliance with security frameworks like Zero Trust, NIST CSF 2.0, and GDPR.

Want to learn more about building an agent fabric?
Visit strata.io/maverics-platform or connect with our team to see how Maverics can unify your human, app, and agent identity across any cloud.