Agent to agent SSO across identity domains: What federation looks like when neither side is human

Agent-to-agent federation is emerging as a major identity and security category, illustrated by Okta’s September 2026 general availability release of Agent SSO, Agent-to-Agent Connections, and Resource Access Certifications under the XAA model and the still-unratified ID-JAG protocol. While organizations can already manage agents within their own environments using workload identity, OAuth delegation, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and short-lived tokens, interactions between agents belonging to different companies create unresolved questions about cross-domain trust, credential provisioning, end-to-end authorization, accountability, and auditability. Protocols such as Google’s A2A standardize agent discovery and task exchange but leave credential provisioning out of scope, while ID-JAG and OAuth token exchange help carry identity and scoped authorization across domains without fully proving that an entire delegation chain was authorized. Competing products from vendors including Okta, Descope, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Cequence, and Postman reflect differing approaches, even as standards bodies and industry groups seek more portable, interoperable trust models. Persistent risks include token reuse, insufficient proof of message origin or agent capability, sensitive-data handling gaps, and fragmented audit trails, making strong internal agent governance—individual, short-lived, narrowly scoped identities with comprehensive logging—a prerequisite for trustworthy external federation.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.