Show HN: Agentic Identity Broker, OAuth Delegation for AI Agents
github.comHi HN, I’m Jan. I am co-author of the Agentic Identity Broker (AIB), an MIT-licensed OAuth2 broker in the Zalando Incubator, that lets a user give an AI agent scoped, revocable access to MCP services.
The broker solves three major challenges that are especially relevant in corporate environments: (A) Enable users to delegate workloads to agents without providing the agents all the user’s tokens. (B) Connect fragmented identity and authorization systems. (C) Centralize tool approvals and audit logging.
We built AIB to fill an infrastructure gap in our own agent platform. At this moment in time, IETF working groups are still finalizing standards for agent identity, and vendors are still turning the necessary infrastructure into off-the-shelf products. We needed that infrastructure today.
How it works: the user consents once per agent and service. The broker stores the third-party tokens encrypted. At request time a gateway (e.g. Agentgateway) does RFC 8693 token exchange. Agents never see user tokens and MCP servers only implement tools and don’t need to care about all the OAuth 2.1 plumbing.
AIB is v0.1 and runs in production, bringing together hundreds of our agents with dozens of internal and external MCP servers.
To try it locally: clone the repo, run "just compose-up-detached".
The current features focus on on-behalf-of (OBO) use cases, where human actors delegate to agents. Next we are looking to also support headless agents, where agents are invoked by machines. Intent-based authorization is yet another package on our roadmap. If you’ve built either, or have feedback on the UI/UX, I’d like to hear from you!
Thanks for sharing, and congrats on the launch.
I looked through GitHub and the .dev site and still have a few questions:
- Why isn’t OAuth delegation enough?
- Is this mainly for enterprise? If IT has already approved an agent for employees to use, what additional KYA/KYB problem still needs to be solved?
- Can you give a few examples of where this actually shows up in someone’s day-to-day use? That’s the part I’m struggling with most.
One suggestion: I’d spend more time on the sites explaining the “why” and the actual problem being solved, and a little less on the “how.” I think that would make it much easier to understand.
not OP but a couple related 'whys' that jumped out to me on their GH so curious your thoughts on them?
>OAuth2 Delegation & Consent. Manage OAuth2 scopes and user consent for third-party service integrations.
>MCP Servers for SaaS. If you want to offer an MCP server to your customers as part of your SaaS, the identity broker can provide an additional consent surface that records which agents were actually used. With centralized tool authorization, you can keep an audit trail of approvals on your side regardless of which agent the customer runs.
How would it handle transitive cases?