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Security teams learned to love identity. If you can tie actions to a user or service principal, you can reason about least privilege, investigate incidents, and enforce policy.
Then agents arrived, and changed the bar.
“Who had access” is no longer the hard question. The hard question is: what actually happened after access was granted, across a chain of services and tools that does not reliably preserve identity context.
That gap has a name: identity chaining.
Identity chaining is the ability to reliably answer, for any sensitive action:
It is one of the most important controls you can have in modern systems, and also the one you usually cannot buy off the shelf.
Because identity chaining is not a feature. It is a contract.
A lot of enterprise security tooling implicitly assumes identity flows cleanly through your stack:
In simple systems, that is mostly true.
In real systems, identity context decays after the first hop.
A user action triggers a web service. That service calls a worker. The worker calls a job runner. The job runner queries a database and hits a third-party API. Somewhere along the way, the original “who” gets replaced by a “what”: a token, a role session, a workload identity, an access key, a service account.
Everything is technically legitimate. And yet the most important detail is missing.
You cannot reliably tell whether that database query was:
This is why investigations drag. This is why blast radius is hard to assess. Agents amplify the problem by making chains longer, faster, and less predictable.
Agentic systems chain tools by design. A single user request can fan out into:
Even when you do the “right” things (scoped tokens, JIT, least privilege, tool gating), one reality remains: Authorization ≠ Appropriateness. Authorization is a permissions check; appropriateness depends on intent and context.
Agents often need broad permissions to be useful. Their actions are not fully predictable. The security requirement shifts from “was this allowed?” to “what did the chain do, who initiated it, and how quickly can we contain outcomes?”
That is identity chaining.
I’ve seen identity chaining done well at Facebook.
It did not come from buying a product. It came from enforcing a standard: every service call was expected to carry viewer context, a structured identity context that captured the originating user, the calling service, the session, and often the reason for access.
The key was enforcement:
That is what it takes for identity chaining to be reliable.
Most enterprises cannot replicate this quickly because:
Many vendors say they support identity chaining. In practice, most can only display identity where it already exists.
Reliable chaining requires identity context to exist everywhere it needs to exist, consistently.
That is why it is so hard to buy.
App-level identity propagation is the cleanest solution. It is also the hardest organizational change to execute.
Doing it properly requires standardizing:
This is not an installation step. It is a multi-quarter platform program, and it competes with feature delivery. Many organizations only prioritize it after a major incident.
So the practical question becomes: what can you do without changing every app?
If you cannot enforce identity chaining as a contract, you can infer it from what you can observe.
This is where runtime comes in.
At Aurva, the approach we’ve taken is:
This is not as clean as native viewer context propagation. But it has clear advantages:
For most security teams, “good enough to act” is better than “perfect but never deployed.”
Identity chaining has layers.
Some layers are tractable today:
Other layers remain hard:
We have solved the telemetry and flow visibility problem. Exact chaining is still an evolving frontier. The right strategy is incremental accuracy with immediate operational value.
If you are deploying AI and agentic systems, treat identity chaining as a first-class requirement.
Three practical steps:
If you can do app-level identity propagation, do it. It is still the gold standard.
But do not wait for perfect propagation before you start protecting data. Most breaches happen in the gaps between “we assume identity follows the request” and “we can prove it did.”
Identity chaining is the control that makes investigations and containment possible in modern stacks. In the agentic era, the bar is simple: can you prove what the chain did with access, and can you contain outcomes fast?
USA
AURVA INC. 1241 Cortez Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, USA - 94086
India
Aurva, 4th Floor, 2316, 16th Cross, 27th Main Road, HSR Layout, Bengaluru – 560102, Karnataka, India
PLATFORM
Access Monitoring
AI Security
AI Observability
Solutions
Integrations
USA
AURVA INC. 1241 Cortez Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, USA - 94086
India
Aurva, 4th Floor, 2316, 16th Cross, 27th Main Road, HSR Layout, Bengaluru – 560102, Karnataka, India
PLATFORM
Access Monitoring
AI Security
AI Observability
Integrations
USA
AURVA INC. 1241 Cortez Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, USA - 94086
India
Aurva, 4th Floor, 2316, 16th Cross, 27th Main Road, HSR Layout, Bengaluru – 560102, Karnataka, India
PLATFORM
Access Monitoring
AI Security
AI Observability
Integrations
