Why it matters

Long-lived keys risk large exposure. Ephemeral limits damage.

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The architecture

Issue: workload identity → vault → short-lived token.

Renew: every minutes/hours.

Ephemeral credentialsWorkload identitySPIFFE / K8s SAVault issuesshort-lived tokenRenew oftenauto-refreshSTS on AWS, Workload Identity on GCP, SPIFFE cross-cloud
Ephemeral flow.
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How it works end to end

AWS STS AssumeRole.

GCP Workload Identity Federation.

K8s + SPIFFE.

Auto-refresh SDK.