]> Okta

macy.abbey@gmail.com

Okta

rafael.cohen@okta.com

SCIM SCIM Agents Agentic applications Workloads The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specification provides schemas that represent common identity information about users and groups, as well as a protocol for communicating that information between systems. The systems that tend to implement SCIM clients and servers are identity providers, and service providers. These are the same systems that are now need to manage agents and agentic applications across domains. This document describes a SCIM 2.0 extension for agents and agentic applications, which includes extensions to the core User and Group objects, and new resource types and schemas for agentic constructs. This extension is intended to provide greater interoperability between Identity providers, agentic applications, agents and their clients while reducing the responsibilities assumed by the every growing list of new protocols for agents. About This Document The latest revision of this draft can be found at . Status information for this document may be found at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .

Introduction The SCIM protocol was originally developed to address an abundance of complex standards for describing and exchanging user information. As stated in the introduction of RFC7643#Section-1.1

• While there are existing standards for describing and exchanging user information, many of these standards can be difficult to implement and/or use...

• This increases both the cost and complexity associated with organizations adopting products and services from multiple cloud providers, as they must perform redundant integration development...SCIM seeks to simplify this problem through an easily implemented specification suite...

With the rise of AI, agents, and agentic applications, we see another abundance of protocols emerging, with varying levels of industry adoption, as well as implementation complexity as many brilliant and enthusiastic early adopters rush to define new standards for identity interopability. This includes but is not limited to:

• ACP
• A2A
• ANS
• AGNTCY

The intent of this SCIM extension is to offer a viable path for the industry to re-leverage the well known core SCIM specifications, as well as existing implementations of SCIM clients and SCIM servers, to solve for agent cross domain management. In doing so, we can free the emerging standards in the agentic AI space to focus on truly novel concerns, instead of addressing the problems already solved by SCIM for user and groups. For example, in the A2A protocol, instead of describing a very high level concept of Curated registries we could offer more concrete guidance by stating Agent Cards may be discovered by a SCIM client accessing any SCIM server that implements this extension.

Conventions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Definitions Agent: A workload with its own identifier, metadata and privileges which are independent of a particular runtime environment or containing application. An agent is distinct from a traditional software workloads (lambdas, services, etc...) due to varying degrees of unpredictable behavior caused by delegation of control flow to artificial intelligence models. Agentic application: An application exposing one or more agents to its users. An agentic application is similar to a traditional native or web application, in that there are pre-defined ways authenticate and interact with the application; however, as soon as the application exposes agents, there are additional considerations for managing access to that application.

Core Schema Extensions

ServiceProviderConfig SCIM endpoints that support Agent extensions MUST advertise this support in the ServiceProviderConfig endpoint as defined: This is required so that: 1) Clients may know if the server supports the concept of Agents. 2) Servers discourage clients from confusing users and agents. If the server does not support the concept of agents, a SCIM client MAY choose to create a User representation in the server for an Agent. All the reasons it may choose to do so are beyond the scope of this document. If the client does so, the client SHOULD indicate the user is linked to an agent using a LinkedObject from draft-grizzle-scim-pam-ext-01 This would allow a SCIM server that supports that SCIM extension to add support for this extension and determine what users in the server should be mapped to agents when support is added.

Additional ResourceTypes and Schemas This SCIM Agent extension defines additional ResourceTypes and Schemas that MAY be implemented by the service provider. If implemented, these ResourceTypes SHOULD support all SCIM operations . All attributes defined in the schemas are optional unless explicitly marked as REQUIRED.

Agent This extension adds a new resource type of "Agent". Pursuant to Section 3.2 Defining New Resource Types this document define the ResourceType, Schema and Extensions for Agent.

Agent Resource Type The Agent Resource Type schema is:

Agent filtering Clients MAY have a reference to the Agent name or externalId but not the ID. For this reason, it is RECOMMENDED that service providers implement filtering that allows equality matching on the "name" and "externalId" attributes. Example (note that escaping has been removed for readability):

Agent Common Attributes The agent resource type contains the common SCIM resource type attributes defined in Section 3.1 Common Attributes They are listed here for completeness:

• id
• externalId
• meta

Agent Core Schema The core agent schema provides the minimal representation of a resource "Agent". It contains only those attributes that any agent may need, and only one attribute is required. It is identified using the schema URI: "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:Agent" The following attributes are defined in the core agent schema.

JSON Representation

Minimal Agent Representation The following is a non-normative example of the minimal required SCIM representation in JSON format.

Full Agent Representation The following is a non-normative example of the fully populated SCIM representation in JSON format.

Agentic application An Agentic application represents a software application that hosts or provides access to one or more agents. It serves as a container and runtime environment for agents, managing their authentication, authorization, and access to resources.

Resource Type The Agentic Application Resource Type schema is:

Filtering Clients MAY have a reference to the Agentic Application name, URL, or externalId but not the ID. For this reason, it is RECOMMENDED that service providers implement filtering that allows equality matching on the "name", "externalId", and "applicationUrls.value" attributes. Example (note that escaping has been removed for readability):

Common attributes The agentic application resource type contains the common SCIM resource type attributes defined in Section 3.1 Common Attributes They are listed here for completeness:

• id
• externalId
• meta

Schema The core agentic application schema provides the representation of an "AgenticApplication" resource. It is identified using the schema URI: "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:AgenticApplication" The following attributes are defined in the core agentic application schema. value The identifier string value. system The system or domain this identifier is valid within. ]]>

Example Example Agentic Application:

Schema JSON Representations This section provides the complete JSON representation for the schemas defined in this extension.

Agent Schema JSON The following is intended as an example of the SCIM schema representation in JSON format for SCIM resources. Where permitted, individual values and schema MAY change. This example includes schema representations for "Agent".

Agentic Application Schema JSON

Security Considerations -> fill out

IANA Considerations This document has no IANA actions.

Change Log -01

• Macy finish up Agent schema description, JSON representation and schema
• Rafael contribution of agent app

-00

• Initial draft extension.

References Normative References The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specifications are designed to make identity management in cloud-based applications and services easier. The specification suite builds upon experience with existing schemas and deployments, placing specific emphasis on simplicity of development and integration, while applying existing authentication, authorization, and privacy models. Its intent is to reduce the cost and complexity of user management operations by providing a common user schema and extension model as well as binding documents to provide patterns for exchanging this schema using HTTP. This document provides a platform-neutral schema and extension model for representing users and groups and other resource types in JSON format. This schema is intended for exchange and use with cloud service providers. In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. Informative References This document provides definitions and an overview of the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM). It lays out the system's concepts, models, and flows, and it includes user scenarios, use cases, and requirements. The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specification is an HTTP-based protocol that makes managing identities in multi-domain scenarios easier to support via a standardized service. Examples include, but are not limited to, enterprise-to-cloud service providers and inter-cloud scenarios. The specification suite seeks to build upon experience with existing schemas and deployments, placing specific emphasis on simplicity of development and integration, while applying existing authentication, authorization, and privacy models. SCIM's intent is to reduce the cost and complexity of user management operations by providing a common user schema, an extension model, and a service protocol defined by this document. Microsoft Okta n.d.

Acknowledgments We would like to thanks the authors of the SCIM Extension for Privileged Access Management and Device Schema Extensions to the SCIM model which served as excellent guidance on how to document proposed extension to the SCIM protocol. Additionaly, we would like to thank all the contributors the emerging agent standards which inspired this extension, including:

• Agent communication protocol
• Agent 2 Agent
• Agent name service
• AGNTCY directory