Agent Vault – Open-source credential proxy and vault for agents

Hey HN! Today we're launching Agent Vault - an open source HTTP credential proxy and vault for AI agents. Repo is at https://github.com/Infisical/agent-vault, and there's an in-depth description at https://infisical.com/blog/agent-vault-the-open-source-crede....We built Agent Vault in response to a question that been plaguing the industry: How do we give agents secure access to services without them reading any secrets?Most teams building agents have run into this exact problem: They build an agent or agentic system and come to realize at some point that it needs credentials in order to access any services. The issue is that agents, unlike traditional workloads, are non-deterministic, highly-prone to prompt injection, and thus can easily be manipulated to leaking the credentials that they need to operate. This is the problem of credential exfiltration (not to be confused with data exfiltration).In response to this, some teams we've seen have implemented basic guardrails and security controls to mitigate this risk in their agentic environments including using short-lived access tokens. The more advanced teams have started to converge toward a pattern: credential brokering, the idea being to separate agents from their credentials through some form of egress proxy. In this model, the agent makes a request to a proxy that attaches a credential onto it and brokers it through to the target service. This proxy approach is actually used in Anthropic's Managed Agents architecture blog with it being that "the harness is never made aware of the credentials." We've seen similar credential brokering schemes come out from Vercel and in Cloudflare's latest Outbound Workers.Seeing all this made us think: What if we could create a portable credential brokering service plugged seamlessly into agents' existing workflows in an interface agnostic way, meaning that agents could continue to work with APIs

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Open-source proxy that lets AI agents access services without ever seeing credentials, solving credential exfiltration in agentic systems.

The pain

Teams building AI agents face a concrete security problem: agents need credentials to call APIs, but agents are non-deterministic and vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that can leak those credentials. Current solutions are either ad-hoc (short-lived tokens) or custom-built (credential brokering proxies), forcing each team to solve this independently.

The gap

No standardized, portable credential brokering layer exists for agents. Anthropic, Vercel, and Cloudflare have each built proprietary versions into their platforms, but there's no open-source tool that works across different agent frameworks and deployment environments. Teams either build this themselves or accept the security risk.

Build angle

Start with the open-source community to establish the standard. The team (Infisical) already has credibility in secrets management. Position Agent Vault as the portable layer that works with any agent framework (LangChain, AutoGPT, Claude SDK, etc.). Revenue comes later through hosted versions, compliance features, and audit logging for enterprises.

Strengths

  • Solves a real, specific problem that major AI companies (Anthropic, Vercel, Cloudflare) have independently identified and built solutions for
  • Team has existing distribution and credibility through Infisical's secrets management product
  • Open-source approach can become the standard before proprietary solutions lock in the market
  • Clear technical architecture (HTTP proxy pattern) that's proven to work at scale
  • Timing is good, agent adoption is accelerating and security concerns are top-of-mind

Risks

  • Market may fragment: major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) could build this into their agent platforms, making open-source version less relevant
  • Adoption requires agent framework integration work; won't be automatic, teams need to actively adopt it
  • Security tool category has high bar for trust; one vulnerability or breach could kill adoption
  • Monetization path unclear; open-source security tools struggle to convert to revenue
  • Problem may be solved at the framework level (e.g., LangChain adds this natively) before this becomes standard
  • Enterprise sales cycle for security tools is long; open-source adoption doesn't automatically convert to revenue

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