What it covers
Secrets are useful material. They are not identity.
This paper examines how authentication breaks when systems are independently operated, intermittently connected, or required to change mission context quickly. It then outlines the shift to attested, workload-bound identity.
Review areas
- Failure modes of static credentials and shared secrets.
- Workload identity as a runtime property.
- Hardware and node evidence as inputs to issuance and trust.
- Federation across authorities without a single central controller.
- Credential lifetime, rotation, and revocation under operational pressure.