If your deployment pipeline calls an external service, there is a good chance it does so using an API key stored somewhere in your infrastructure. A text string. Created once, copied into a config file, and then mostly forgotten until something breaks or someone panics.
That is how most teams handle credentials for package registries, AI platforms, and third-party services. It works, right up until it does not.
Pulumi, the infrastructure-as-code platform, just changed the math on this. Their new feature in Pulumi ESC, their environment and secrets management product, lets any deployment pipeline or automated agent receive a short-lived identity token instead of a stored API key. The token is valid for an hour at most, then it expires. Nothing gets stored. Nothing needs rotating.
The mechanism behind this is called OIDC, which stands for OpenID Connect. It is a standard identity protocol used everywhere from logging into apps with Google to federating identities across cloud providers. The core idea: instead of handing a system a permanent password, you issue it a signed, time-limited credential that can be verified without storing a secret on either end.
Here is what changes in practice. If an attacker gets into your CI/CD pipeline, which is the automated system that tests and deploys your code, the first thing they look for is stored credentials. A long-lived API key for your package registry or AI service provider is exactly what they want. It works from anywhere, indefinitely, until someone notices and rotates it. Rotation, by the way, breaks every pipeline using that key until each one picks up the new value. Teams avoid doing it as often as they should because it is painful.
With short-lived OIDC tokens, there is nothing worth stealing. A token created at 2 PM is worthless by 3 PM. An attacker who captures it has a shrinking window. In practice, they have far less than an hour, because normal pipeline operations do not leave tokens sitting around.
This matters even more as AI agents become part of deployment workflows. An AI agent that holds a stored API key can leak it through a bad input prompt. A token that expires in fifteen minutes is not worth leaking. The exposure window is simply too small.
Pulumi already supported this kind of short-lived authentication for the major cloud providers. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all work this way. What is new is extending the same mechanism to any service that accepts OIDC tokens, including Anthropic’s Claude API, JFrog Artifactory, Cloudsmith, and Aembit. That closes a real gap at the edges of infrastructure where long-lived keys tend to accumulate.
The principle is not complicated. Credentials should exist for exactly as long as needed, and not one second longer. Most tooling has not caught up to that standard. This one just did.
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