What is Aembit?

Aembit is a cloud-native Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform: IAM for Agentic AI & Workloads. The name comes from ‘ambit’ (meaning boundary or scope). Where traditional User IAM governs how people sign in to applications, Aembit governs how non-human identities authenticate and reach the resources they depend on. It does this across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments.

These non-human identities come in two forms, and Aembit secures both with one identity-first model. A is any application or program that uses computing resources to do work: a CI/CD job, a microservice, a database client, or a serverless function. An authenticates, requests credentials, and reaches resources the same way, whether it acts on a person’s behalf (a user-driven assistant like Claude Desktop) or runs on its own (an autonomous service). The difference is the workload type, not the security model.

Both face the same core problem. Traditional approaches to workload authentication rely on static credentials embedded in code, configuration files, or environment variables. These credentials must be manually created, rotated, and protected. This creates significant security and operational challenges.

Aembit takes a fundamentally different approach by shifting from managing static secrets to managing access based on verified workload identity and policy. This Workload IAM approach provides just-in-time, ephemeral credentials while enforcing dynamic access policies.

Without Aembit, a workload pulls a long-lived secret from a store; with Aembit, it receives a just-in-time credential after verifying its identity

AI agents raise the stakes for this model. A user-driven agent acts with its operator’s full rights, which breaks attribution (you can’t tell whether the user or the agent took an action). The MCP servers that connect agents to your systems also hold long-lived credentials. Aembit closes this gap by giving the agent a verifiable identity that Access Policies evaluate alongside the user’s. See blended identity and securing AI agent access for the full story.

How Aembit works A deeper look at how Aembit works and its architecture

→

Whether you’re securing AI agents or traditional workloads, the model is the same. Pick the path that fits what you’re building:

AI agents

Claude Desktop, MCP clients, and user-driven assistants.

Securing AI agent access Blended identity AI Guide

Workloads

CI/CD jobs, microservices, databases, and APIs.

Workload use cases Access Policies User Guide

Aembit’s core principles

Manage Access, Not Secrets - The foundational principle of Aembit is to shift the security focus from managing static credentials to managing access based on verified workload identity and policy. Instead of relying on long-lived secrets that you must store, protect, and rotate, Aembit employs mechanisms to authenticate workloads based on their intrinsic properties and environment.

Aembit grants access based on defined and real-time context.
Zero Trust Architecture - Aembit’s identity-centric approach aligns with the principles of Zero Trust architecture, extending concepts traditionally applied to human users into the domain of non-human workloads.

Aembit never implicitly trusts access.
Least Privilege - Aembit verifies every access request based on a ‘s identity, the specific resource its requesting (), and applicable contextual constraints defined in the Access Policy. This confirms adherence to the principle of Least Privilege.

Aembit grants only the necessary permissions required for a specific task at a specific time.

What Aembit can do for you

Aembit’s value proposition centers on enhancing security and operational efficiency in managing non-human identities.

This offers specific benefits for different roles:

Build applications with secretless access

If you’re building and deploying applications, AI agents, or MCP integrations, managing secrets is a common challenge. Aembit solves this by enabling a “secretless” approach for workload-to-workload access. Aembit lets your applications and agents dynamically obtain credentials based on their verified identity and policy, simplifying your development process by:

Removing the need to embed credentials in application code, configuration files, or environment variables.
Authenticating applications using their runtime attributes (like container signatures), removing the need for initial secrets (“secret zero” problem).
Handling authentication via network interception, so you can focus on business logic instead of auth code.
Letting AI agents and MCP clients authenticate without holding credentials, which Aembit issues or exchanges at request time.

Aembit quickstart Start building with Aembit by checking out the quickstart guide

→

Advance security maturity and risk reduction

From a strategic perspective focused on risk and security maturity, Aembit provides a dedicated platform to secure non-human identities. They’re a significant and growing source of enterprise risk, as teams adopt AI agents alongside traditional workloads. By replacing insecure static credentials with an identity-first, secretless approach, Aembit drastically reduces the attack surface and the risk of breaches.

Aembit supports implementing a Zero Trust architecture for workloads, simplifies compliance and auditing, and offers centralized visibility and governance to advance your organization’s security maturity by:

Reducing credential exposure risk through ephemeral, Just-In-Time (JIT) access grants.
Implementing Zero Trust principles for machine-to-machine communication.
Centralizing access logs for simplified compliance reporting and incident investigation.
Providing consistent access patterns across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises resources.
Addressing the security gap in non-human workload interactions without adding developer overhead.
Giving each user-driven AI agent a distinct, verifiable identity separate from the human operating it, closing the audit-attribution gap.

Aembit use cases Check out Aembit's use cases to see how it can help you

→

Enhance security posture and enforce access control

As a security engineer responsible for defining and enforcing controls, Aembit enhances your security posture by focusing on securing non-human identity access. Aembit provides centralized policy management and conditional access capabilities. You can enforce granular controls over workload and AI agent access alike, based on verifiable identity and live context like security posture.

This helps implement Zero Trust principles for workloads and reduces risk by:

Verifying workload identity using concrete attributes like container signatures or cloud metadata.
Implementing fine-grained access controls based on workload context and runtime conditions.
Reducing attack surface by eliminating long-lived static credentials.
Providing standardized logging of all access attempts for troubleshooting and audit trails.
Enabling identity-based security without requiring deep security expertise from application developers.
Applying the same conditional-access controls (time, location, security posture) to AI agent access, and revoking a specific user, user-agent combination, or all agents through policy, without rotating credentials.

Aembit security posture Check out Aembit's software architecture, threat model, and compliance

→

Streamline secure deployments and operations

For those focused on automating and managing infrastructure, Aembit integrates identity and access management for your workloads and AI agents directly into your operational workflows. Aembit enables you to focus on building and deploying applications through the following benefits:

Automating credential management tasks, reducing time spent on access provisioning and rotation.
Eliminating manual secret rotation workflows that distract from core development work.
Integrating with existing workloads without requiring application code changes.
Providing a Terraform provider for managing configurations and infrastructure as code.
Centralizing access management across multiple environments from a single interface.
Integrating with your existing identity providers (Okta, Entra ID, Google) over OIDC and SAML to secure AI agent access, with no new identity infrastructure to stand up.

Scaling Aembit with Terraform See how Aembit integrates with Terraform to manage your infrastructure

→

Key capabilities

The tables in the following sections detail Aembit’s primary capabilities, along with example use cases and what benefit Aembit provides for each:

Blended identity for AI agents


Capability	For user-driven AI agents, Aembit evaluates a in a single Access Policy: the human user’s identity (from your identity provider) together with the agent’s workload identity.
Example Use Case	An employee uses Claude Desktop to query Jira and search Confluence through an MCP server. Aembit authenticates the user through your IdP, identifies the agent by its workload identity, and issues a short-lived token scoped to both, so the security team can use an agent to reach the vulnerability scanner while engineering reaches only Jira and Confluence.
Benefit	Every access event carries both the user and the agent (dual attribution), and you enforce least privilege at the agent layer. You can revoke a specific user, user-agent combination, or all agents through policy, without rotating credentials.

Zero-credential MCP access


Capability	For AI agents and MCP clients, Aembit’s MCP Identity Gateway sits in front of your MCP servers as a transparent proxy. It enforces Access Policies and injects per-request credentials that Aembit manages, so the agent never holds credentials for the MCP servers it reaches.
Example Use Case	An engineering team points Claude Desktop at the Identity Gateway instead of connecting to MCP servers directly. Aembit authenticates each user, applies your Access Policies, and injects each user’s own credentials per request, so each user’s access stays isolated from the rest and the agent holds none of them.
Benefit	Agents hold no downstream credentials, access follows the policies you define, and every request is attributable to a specific user, agent, and target MCP server.

Secretless workload authentication


Capability	Aembit authenticates workloads (like applications or scripts) based on their verifiable environment attributes (workload attestation) rather than relying on stored secrets like API keys or passwords.
Example Use Case	In a multicloud setup, an automated script running in an AWS EC2 instance needs to access a database hosted in Google Cloud. Instead of embedding database credentials within the script or its configuration, Aembit verifies the script’s identity based on its AWS environment attributes.
Benefit	Aembit eliminates the risk of exposing the database credentials if an attacker compromises the script’s code or configuration files. It also removes the operational overhead of rotating and managing those static secrets.

Conditional Access Policies


Capability	Aembit enables Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)-like controls for workloads by defining access policies that consider not just the workload’s identity but also live contextual factors like security posture (results from a vulnerability scan), geographical location, or time of day.
Example Use Case	A microservice responsible for processing payments is only allowed to access the production billing API if all the following are true: 1) it has a verified identity, 2) a recent security scan (for example, via Snyk integration) shows no critical vulnerabilities, 3) the request originates from the expected cloud region, 4) the request originates during specific business hours.
Benefit	Aembit provides a higher level of assurance than identity alone, mimicking for non-human interactions. Aembit enables fine-grained, risk-adaptive control, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access even if a workload’s basic identity is somehow spoofed.

Identity brokering across heterogeneous environments


Capability	Aembit acts as a central intermediary, managing access requests between workloads that might reside in different environments (multiple public clouds, on-premises data centers, SaaS applications, third-party APIs).
Example Use Case	A legacy application running in an on-premises data center needs to fetch customer data from Salesforce (SaaS) and store processed results in an AWS S3 bucket (public cloud). Aembit manages the authentication and authorization for both interactions through a unified policy framework.
Benefit	It simplifies security management in complex, hybrid/multi-cloud setups by providing a single point of control and visibility, eliminating the need to configure and manage disparate access control mechanisms for each environment.

Centralized Access Policy management & auditing


Capability	Aembit provides a global system to define, enforce, and monitor access rules between all managed non-human identities. It also offers centralized logging and auditing of all access events.
Example Use Case	A security team needs to define a policy stating that only specific, approved data analytics services running in Kubernetes can access a sensitive data warehouse (like Snowflake ). They also need a consolidated audit trail of all access attempts to this data warehouse for compliance reporting.
Benefit	Centralization simplifies administration, makes sure policy enforcement is consistent across the board, and makes auditing and compliance reporting much easier compared to managing policies and logs scattered across different systems.

Automation and “No-Code Auth”


Capability	Aembit automates the process of authenticating workloads and providing them with necessary credentials just-in-time. Its interception mechanism (via ) aims to secure workload communication without requiring you to modify application code to handle authentication logic.
Example Use Case	A development team deploys a new microservice. Instead of writing code to handle API key retrieval and injection for accessing downstream services, they deploy Aembit Edge Components alongside their service. Aembit then: 1) automatically intercepts outgoing calls, 2) handles authentication/authorization via a central Access Policy, 3) injects credentials as needed.
Benefit	Aembit reduces developer friction, speeds up deployment cycles, and makes sure the security implementation is consistent without placing the burden of complex authentication coding on application developers. It also improves operational efficiency by automating credential lifecycle management.