Short-Lived Credentials in Agentic Systems: A Practical Trade-off Guide

Agentic systems need short-lived credentials as a baseline security control. That point is pretty clear . The harder part is when teams move from architecture diagrams to production systems and discover how much operational machinery underpins that decision. Security teams often frame credential lifetime as a clean principle. Short-lived good and long-lived bad. Production systems rarely live inside principles alone. In reality, they live inside retry logic, partial failures, identity providers,