Identity & Token Flow

The caller's own credential never leaves the gateway. For each downstream hop NeuralSeek mints a fresh, narrowly scoped delegated token bound to one audience and one scope, valid for 120 seconds.

Delegation chain

Inbound credential is terminated; a new scoped token is issued per downstream call

Caller identity

sub: —
act: —
credential: inbound agent token

Presented to the gateway only. Never forwarded.

terminated

NeuralSeek STS

iss: gateway.neuralseek.internal/sts
policy: user ∩ agent ∩ tool ∩ policy
mint: one token per downstream call

Exchange, not passthrough. Scope narrowed to the single tool contract.

scoped token

Downstream MCP server

aud: mcp://…
scope: —
exp: 120s TTL

Validates issuer, audience, expiry and scope before executing.

issuer validation

iss must equal the gateway STS — foreign issuers rejected.

audience validation

aud must equal the exact downstream MCP server URI.

expiry validation

exp within 120s of iat; clock skew tolerance 5s.

scope validation

scope must be a subset of the tool contract and the effective permission.

PASSTHROUGH-DENY — raw token passthrough is structurally impossible: the gateway holds no forwarding path for inbound credentials, so a downstream server can never act with the caller's authority (confused-deputy risk removed by construction, not by configuration).

Issued tokens

One per mediated downstream call

No tokens minted yet

Denied requests never receive one.

Token detail

select a call

none

No call selected