Show HN: Agent Vault – Open-source credential proxy and vault for agents (opens in new tab)

Thanks for this feedback! Will keep in mind all of these points as we iterate on Agent Vault.

We're pretty swarmed on requests at the moment but I've noted these down as improvements to AV; it's a work in progress, we'll be molding it into the right shape over the next few months.

A few thoughts for each of the above:

1. AV doesn't consider OAuth2 tokens atm but this is definitely a next step.

2. Agree which is why there is a "passthrough" mode; for each endpoint, you need to explicitly specify what credential is used for it.

3. That's correct. This is a MITM architecture with credential brokering capabilities added on top.

4. Agree. The idea here is that AV can function both as a proxy and vault but in a true production setting, it should pull credentials from a secure secrets store like Infisical. This way credentials cached in memory in AV can even be made ephemeral.

Great observations all around and we have plans for them :)

Yup it turns out many teams building their own custom agents end up stitching together their own solutions for this problem.

What we thought was basically: If everyone is making some version of this egress proxy, maybe we're actually missing a new infrastructure component that does not yet exist in a mainstream way for this use case. The form factor of this was very important in the design of it since it needed to fit in with the tools and workflows that agents are already using today.

Definitely regarding the domain-based allowlist and this is part of how it currently works. As an egress proxy it basically functions as a firewall and we intend to extend it with more capabilities that'll make it more useful.

Well, there's the token exchange RFC, which defines on-behalf-of/delegation and impersonation semantics.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8693 has all the details, but here's an example:

   {
      "aud":"https://consumer.example.com",
      "iss":"https://issuer.example.com",
      "exp":1443904177,
      "nbf":1443904077,
      "sub":"user@example.com",
      "act":
      {
        "sub":"admin@example.com"
      }
   }

In this case, the user is user@example.com, but the actor is admin@example.com. (In the agentic case, the actor would be the AI agent.)

Is this kinda what you are looking for?

Yeah this should work in an interface agnostic way so be it that the agent invokes CLI, MCP, SDK, or makes an API call, all traffic is routed through the proxy.

That said, there are many DX improvements to be made such as making it easier to load in credentials into AV and more thinking more around how to optimally handle token refreshes. Part of the questioning there is how much work should be delegated to AV and how much should be to the underlying secrets manager (if connected).

Hey! Yeah I think there's overlapping functionality for sure, and you're spot on on people looking at it from different angles.

The "connectors angle" is something we thought about as well and we built a whole product line around that called Agent Sentinel (I'll link that below). We weren't convinced, however, that enterprises were ready for this and instead took it back to our infra roots (Infisical is a security infra platform) and started simple with the problem: credential exfiltration. This thinking does lead to two different kinds of products though with one naturally becoming an infrastructure component; this makes much more sense for us at Infisical to work on.

https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/agent-sent...

@10keane The proxy approach also solves the audit trail problem implicit in what you're describing. With OS keyring substitution, the agent receives the credential and you can't observe what happens next — the log shows intent (substitution happened) but not effect (what API calls were actually made). Routing through a proxy gives you an immutable record of every call made with each credential, which is the more useful thing for incident response: not "did the agent have access?" but "what did it actually do with it?"

The capability-scoping gap you're pointing at (static vs. dynamic trust) is the next layer up — effectively per-session IAM roles minted at task time, scoped to the specific endpoints the task actually needs. That's harder but it's the right direction.

Yup! I think the terminologies we're going to be seeing more and more of are "credential exfiltration" and conversely "credential brokering" as a solution to that.

The sandboxed agent and AV should ideally not run on the same host because if it did then you're right that a sufficiently sophisticated agent like Mythos could try to reverse engineer and like find kernel exploits to gain access AV credentials.

For this reason, you'd want to keep the two separate; we have some ideas in the works for that atm but largely still experimental.

Not yet for both but this would definitely be on the roadmap; especially the credential stripping portion.

For AV to be really useful, it'd have to support more protocols but we think this first implementation makes a move in the right direction.

Yeah so Agent Vault (AV) solves the credential exfiltration problem which is related to but different from data exfiltration.

You're right that if an attacker can access the proxy vault then by definition they'd similarly be able to proxy requests through it to get data back but at least AV prevents them from gaining direct access to begin with (the key to access the proxy vault itself can also be made ephemeral, scoped to a particular agent run). I'd also note that you'd want to lockdown the networking around AV so it isn't just exposed to the public internet.

The general idea is that we're converging as an industry on credential brokering as one type of layered defense mechanism for agents: https://infisical.com/blog/agent-vault-the-open-source-crede...

We'll be releasing a closer integration between Agent Vault and Infisical in the coming 1-2 weeks!

The way we see it is that you'd still need to centrally store/manage secrets from a vault; this part isn't going anywhere and should still deliver secrets to the rest of your workloads.

The part that's new is Agent Vault which is really a delivery mechanism to help agents use secrets in a way that they don't get leaked. So, it would be natural to integrate the two.

This is definitely on the roadmap!

To be honest, I haven't used OneCLI personally before so I can't speak to it in detail but Agent Vault does take a similar approach with the MITM architecture and setting HTTPS_PROXY in the agent's environment to route traffic through the proxy; we feel like this is the right approach in terms of interface-agnostic ergonomics given that agents may interact with upstream services thru a number of means: API, CLI, SDK, MCP, etc.

Since we are in the beginnings of Agent Vault (AV), I wouldn't be surprised if there were many similarities. That said, AV likely takes a different approach with how its core primitives behave (e.g. define specific services along with how their auth schemes work) and is specifically designed in an infra-forward way that also considers agents as first class citizens.

When designing AV, we think a lot about the workflows that you might encounter, for instance, if you're designing a custom sandboxed agent; maybe you have a trusted orchestrator that needs to update credentials in AV and authenticate with it using workload identity in order to mint a short-lived token to be passed into a sandbox for an agent - this is possible. I suspect that how we think about the logical design starting from an infra standpoint will over time create two different experiences for a proxy.

If I understand correctly regarding credential stripping then yes. The idea is that you set the credentials in Agent Vault and define which services should be allowed through it, including the authentication method (e.g. Bearer token) to be used together with which credential.

We don't have plans yet to integrate with Bitwarden at this time but this could be something worth looking into at some point. We definitely would like to give Agent Vault first-class support for Infisical as a storage for credentials (this way you'd get all the benefits of secrets rotation, dynamic secrets, point in time recovery, secret versioning, etc. that already come with it).

NVIDIA's OpenShell also has its own version of this, though its also in very early stages.

It looks a lot like OneCLI too. Curious how it differs.

Can you please elaborate on the agent signing up for a service piece? I'm curious to understand the use case more (type of agent, what credit, etc.).

The current modal assumes that you have a trusted entity whose able to save credentials to Agent Vault; that entity is likely not the agent itself because that would mean that the agent would have access to credentials. The agent is then simply configured to proxy requests through AV which attaches credentials at this proxy layer. Here are two examples:

Example 1:

- You have a backend that saves an API Key to AV for a specific vault and defines the service rules for how that credential can be used.

- That same backend mints a session-scoped token to AV and invokes the creation of a pre-configured sandbox, passing that token into it.

- The agent in the sandbox does what it needs to do, requests fully proxied through AV.

Example 2:

- A human operator manually goes into AV and adds an API Key.

- The human operator spins up an agent (could be an OpenClaw, Claude Code, etc.) in a pre-configured environment to route requests through AV. This can be done using non-cooperative sandbox mode with the AV CLI or through more manual configuration.

- The agent does what it needs to do, requests fully proxied through AV.

We're still working on smoothening it out but perhaps this gives you a better idea of how this might work.

AV does have a permission system that supports agents being able to save credentials to it and then subsequently using the proxy (maybe this is what you're targeting) but this isn't the use case that I've personally explored at much; definitely worth looking into tho.

Thank you! Me too - very excited to see where this goes :)

I haven't used executor.sh but this seems to operate at a different layer from Agent Vault.

From what I'm seeing, executor.sh is an integration and execution layer for agents. Where Agent Vault shines is that it fits right into the tools and workflows that your agents are already using in an interface-agnostic way: API, CLI, SDK, MCP.

Put differently, the MITM architecture of Agent Vault (operates more at the network‑layer) allows the sandboxed agent can do whatever it would've done normally, just all routed through AV - the agent is basically proxy unaware.

Try out, https://github.com/manojbajaj95/authsome . I'm trying to work with LLM secrets too. Still alpha, but thats the direction i'm taking

This would be deployed separately but in close proximity to your sandboxes. You'd want to add network restrictions around sandboxes to only allow outbound requests to AV.

You'd add HTTPS_PROXY to your sandbox environment and pre-configure it to trust the AV CA.

Agent Vault should remain in close proximity to the sandboxed agent and not be exposed to the public internet; your standard network security controls apply.

The proxy itself currently implements a token-based auth scheme. Depending on your setup, you can have an orchestrator mint an ephemeral token to be passed to a sandboxed agent to authenticate with the proxy.

Hey! At the moment Agent Vault doesn't address the identity piece.

The identity piece would be the next logical step at some point likely after we figure out the optimal ergonomics for deploying and integrating AV into different infrastructure / agent use cases first.

We actually work a lot with identity at Infisical (anything from workload identity to X.509 certificates) and had considered tackling the identity problem for agents as well but it felt like it required an ecosystem-wide change with many more considerations to it including protocols like A2A. The most immediate problem being credential exfiltration seemed like the right place to start since we have a lot of experience with secrets management.

From what I can tell, agent-vault does not solve identity, only how its stored. For true agent identity, you should look into: https://github.com/highflame-ai/zeroid (author: full disclosure)