From API Keys to Access Control: Rethinking Secrets Management

Traditional secrets management has progressed from hard-coded credentials to environment variables, centralized vaults, and local credential helpers, but each approach still gives the calling application the plaintext secret at runtime. The passage argues that this model becomes riskier with AI agents, which can dynamically select tools, processes, and endpoints, making it difficult to predict where inherited credentials may be used or exposed. It proposes replacing distributed secrets with credential references that are resolved by a secure proxy within an organization’s network, allowing the proxy to inject credentials while callers never receive them. This access-oriented approach supports cryptographically bound identities, operation-level permissions, per-consumer revocation, and detailed attribution across people, CI pipelines, and agents. Postman Passport is presented as an implementation of this model, integrating with existing secret stores to keep credentials within private networks while granting scoped, revocable API access.

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