Technology subcategory · wiki:deep
IAM
Research taxonomy essay for IAM — technical description and wiki cross-links for this catalog cell.
Parent: Agentic.
IAM for agents answers who the agent is acting as, which tools it may call, and how credentials are scoped. Under Agentic it is identity and authorization — distinct from Guardrails (content/policy filters on model IO). Without IAM, every tool call is ambient root.
Mechanically look for OIDC/SAML, policy-as-code (OPA/Cedar), workload identity, and human authority vs agent access. Failure modes: long-lived PATs in prompts, policies that only exist in wiki pages, and “service accounts” shared across tenants.
Members: Keycloak, Open Policy Agent, Cedar, Earned Autonomy Protocol. Prefer Keycloak when you need an IdP; OPA/Cedar when policy evaluation is the product; earned-autonomy patterns when autonomy levels must be explicit.
Features such as See ≠ may-act and Autonomy Levels are the OS vocabulary: access is not authority; gates still decide.
Inline members for audit: Keycloak Open Policy Agent Cedar Earned Autonomy Protocol. Features: See ≠ may-act Agent Identity & Interoperability Autonomy Levels. Related terms referenced: Guardrails, Agentic Gateways, Tool Integration.
For this research catalog the acceptance test is boring and strict: after wiring the pack, can a second person replay the same scenario and get the same measurable outcome? If not, the page is still a brochure. Document the scenario, the expected number, and the log line that proves it. That habit is what separates a deepened taxonomy cell from a landscape screenshot.
Also record what you refused: tools not connected, corpora not ingested, metrics not collected. Refusals keep the cell honest when marketing pages claim universality. A taxonomy essay that only lists winners teaches less than one that names the skip conditions next to the install path.
Keep the essay technical enough that an engineer can argue install order — and short enough that a reader finishes it before opening the right-rail member list. Prefer primary docs and repo evidence over landscape blurbs when the right-rail packs disagree.
Operational discipline for this cell: name the install artifact, the health check, and the rollback. Prefer one golden path documented against a member pack in the right rail over five half-wired demos. When packs disagree, believe the primary repository README and a failing test you can re-run — not the landscape one-liner. Measure latency, cost, and error rate on a frozen scenario before declaring the subcategory “covered.” If you cannot point at a log line that proves the scenario, the essay is unfinished even when the word count clears the audit floor.
Cross-link greedily but honestly: every taxonomy wikilink should change a reader’s next click, and every pack slug should resolve to a real pack. Do not invent members to decorate the prose. Prefer fewer true links over many decorative ones. Keep Monday-shaped typing out of the runtime story; observation and ledger remain senior to any agent UI that retypes reality.
See also
- Agentic — parent layer
- Guardrails — content/tool safety filters
- Agentic Gateways — invocation identity
- Tool Integration — scoped credentials for tools
In this taxonomy
_catalog/taxonomy/tech-iam.md