AI Agent Authorisation Review
Make delegated authority inspectable. Trace who an agent acts for, what it can access and how that access can be withdrawn.
Match effective permissions to the delegation
- Granting principal
- Identify who may authorise the requested action.
- Agent identity
- Bind credentials to the workload and current mandate.
- Resource policy
- Check the action against resource and tenant scope.
- Revocation path
- Trace how withdrawn authority stops further access.
Engagement boundary
Agree the work and its boundaries together
The engagement boundary
- Granting principal
- Inventory agent identities, credentials and delegation chains.
- Agent identity
- The inputs, authorised access and client participants are confirmed before scheduling.
- Identity owner
- Retains organisational decisions and risk acceptance.
- Additional implementation
- Changing identity infrastructure, migrating credentials and operating access reviews are separate work. A retest must identify the changed policy and the cases to rerun.
What the work covers
- Inventory agent identities, credentials and delegation chains.
- Compare effective permissions with intended authority and ownership.
- Examine attribution, credential expiry and revocation paths.
Scope boundaries
- Formal certification, legal conclusions and guarantees of safe or compliant behaviour.
- Implementation or ongoing operation beyond the agreed scope.
- Changing identity infrastructure, migrating credentials and operating access reviews are separate work. A retest must identify the changed policy and the cases to rerun.
Decision and fit
Match effective permissions to the delegation
Compare the engagement with the decision you face
- A question worth resolving
- Match effective permissions to the delegation.
- An accountable participant
- Identity and security owners who need to understand which person or workload authorises consequential agent actions.
- Inspectable source material
- The relevant owners can make workflow evidence and agreed inputs available for examination.
- A scope mismatch
- You need identity infrastructure implementation as the primary deliverable.
The engagement
Make delegated authority inspectable. Trace who an agent acts for, what it can access and how that access can be withdrawn. A focused authorisation review across agreed identities, tools and delegation paths.
The decision at stake
Credentials and delegated permissions have grown without a shared account of who authorised each action.
Suitable situations
- Identity and security owners who need to understand which person or workload authorises consequential agent actions.
Less suitable situations
- You need identity infrastructure implementation as the primary deliverable.
Working sequence
How the work moves from question to handover
What each stage should leave your team with
- Map the acting identities
A chain of human, agent and tool principals.
- Compare intended and effective access
Intended permissions compared with effective grants.
- Exercise revocation and denial
Evidence of denial, expiry and revocation behaviour.
- Assign control changes
Control changes linked to repeatable checks.
How the work proceeds
- Map the acting identities. Follow a user request through agent, service account and downstream tool identities, recording where authority changes.
- Compare intended and effective access. Review granted scopes against the task and inspect where enforcement occurs outside the model's instructions.
- Exercise revocation and denial. Use approved cases to examine expired grants, removed users, cross-user access and attribution of rejected actions.
- Assign control changes. Provide an authority map and prioritised permission changes, each paired with a check the identity owner can repeat.
Worked situation
Follow one situation through to a bounded next decision
Illustrative working situation
Illustrative scenario
- Starting condition
A delegated task ends while its credential remains usable.
- Question to examine
Inspect mandate expiry and effective resource permissions.
- Possible next action
Prioritise revocation verification before expanding authority.
Decision artefacts
Leave a record the next owner can use
Delegation record
Illustrative working format
- Subject and version
- Identify the workflow, configuration or proposal examined.
- Granting principal
- Record the relevant requirement and supporting material.
- Resource policy
- State the observation, supporting evidence and remaining uncertainty.
- Identity owner
- Record the next decision, follow-up and unresolved question.
What the work can produce
- Identity and delegation map
- Permission and revocation findings
- Authority verification cases
Working together
Your team and our team need a clear working agreement
Who contributes and who decides
- Client sponsor
- Confirms the decision, priorities and people needed to resolve it.
- Client technical or process owner
- Provides the agreed evidence, access and review of findings or deliverables.
- Softlander delivery lead
- Coordinates the agreed activities, review points, handover and open actions.
- Authorised decision-maker
- Accepts deliverables against the agreed criteria and separately decides operational or business action.
What the work depends on
- An identity administrator and application owner provide sanitised permission policies, delegation flows, credential lifecycle settings and representative allow/deny cases. Never send live credentials in the initial inquiry.
Engagement availability
The start date, named delivery roles, review points and fee basis are agreed after confirming the inputs and scope. Duration depends on evidence access, system complexity and the time your decision-makers need to review the work.
Engagement and handover
Agree the delivery model and what completion means
A clear agreement from scope to ownership
- Scoped work
- Inventory agent identities, credentials and delegation chains.
- Indicative handover
- Identity and delegation map; Permission and revocation findings
- Review and acceptance
- Review the agreed deliverables and record any open items, owners and conditions.
- Ongoing work
- Assign maintenance and operational ownership; agree additional scope and coverage explicitly.
A focused authorisation review across agreed identities, tools and delegation paths.
The authority map names the principal, delegated scope, enforcement point and revocation path for each reviewed action. Findings distinguish intended policy from observed permissions and include verification cases for the responsible identity owner.
Changing identity infrastructure, migrating credentials and operating access reviews are separate work. A retest must identify the changed policy and the cases to rerun.