1. Register the federation
Federation is registered per workload, per cloud. The token audience is derived server-side from the registered descriptor, so a workload can only request tokens for audiences an owner or admin registered — the registration list is the workload’s token-audience allowlist.--project-id, --project-number, --pool-id, and
--provider-id (plus optional --service-account-email to impersonate). Microsoft Entra
registrations take --application-id and --entra-tenant-id.
2. Configure the cloud-side trust
federation setup prints the exact, copyable trust configuration for one registration — read-only,
it never changes your cloud account:
org:<id>:workload:<id>), so the mapping is exact and auditable on both sides. For AWS,
--organization-wide widens the trust from one workload to every workload in the organization; the
pattern stays organization-pinned. Two operational notes: Microsoft Entra allows at most 20 federated identity
credentials per application, and a typo in issuer/subject/audience is often accepted at creation
and fails only at exchange — verify the exact values if an exchange is rejected.
3. Use it inside the sandbox
This is the shape the sandbox lane will take, and it is not reachable yet (see the warning above). Once a sandbox can run as the workload,hiloop workload-identity wires the cloud SDKs to the
ambient identity. setup prints the exact SDK wiring for every registered federation descriptor
(pass --cloud aws|gcp|azure to narrow it):
hiloop workload-identity token --audience <audience> mints one raw federation JWT to stdout when
you need to drive an exchange yourself. Every audience must be on the workload’s registered
allowlist — an unregistered audience is refused.
Revoke
Removing a registration revokes the audience on the hiloop side immediately:Why this shape
- Nothing to leak. There is no long-lived cloud key in the sandbox, its environment, its workspace, or the platform’s stores.
- Attribution on both sides. A cloud API call made this way carries the workload’s pinned subject in your cloud audit log and the workload’s name in the hiloop run record.
- Scoped by construction. The audience allowlist is registered per workload by an owner or admin, and your cloud trust policy decides exactly what that audience may do.
Related pages
- Workload identity — principals, launch ACLs, and attribution.
- Managing secrets — for third-party API credentials that are not cloud-native.
- Security model — where keyless access sits in the layered defense.