Zalando Incubator has released the Agentic Identity Broker (AIB), an MIT-licensed OAuth2 broker that lets a user give an AI agent scoped, revocable access to MCP services. Co-author Jan says the project addresses three challenges common in corporate environments: enabling users to delegate workloads to agents without sharing all of their tokens, connecting fragmented identity and authorization systems, and centralizing tool approvals and audit logging.
AIB was built to fill an infrastructure gap in Zalando's own agent platform while IETF working groups are still finalizing standards for agent identity. The user consents once per agent and service, and the broker stores third-party tokens encrypted. A gateway such as Agentgateway performs RFC 8693 token exchange at request time, so agents never see user tokens and MCP servers only need to implement tools. The project is at v0.1 and runs in production, connecting hundreds of agents with dozens of internal and external MCP servers.
The broker's features include secure identity management, OAuth2 delegation and consent management, security-first design with fail-closed architecture, and structured JSON audit logging. It offers particular value for internal MCP servers, which would otherwise each need their own OAuth2.1 setup, and for SaaS providers who want an additional consent surface that records which agents were used.
Current development focuses on on-behalf-of flows, where humans delegate to agents. Planned work includes support for headless agents invoked by machines and intent-based authorization. Developers can try it locally by cloning the repository and running "just compose-up-detached".
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing