Zalando broker lets users delegate OAuth access to agents

Zalando Incubator’s Agentic Identity Broker runs in production at v0.1 as of Nov. 6, co-author Jan said in a Hacker News post published that day.

The MIT-licensed OAuth2 broker connects hundreds of agents with dozens of internal and external Model Context Protocol servers as of Nov. 6, the post said. MCP is a protocol for linking AI systems to tools and services.

Zalando built AIB for its own agent platform, where users needed a way to assign tasks to AI agents without handing over all user tokens. “We needed that infrastructure today,” Jan said.

The broker is designed to let a user approve access once for each agent and service. It stores third-party tokens in encrypted form, while a gateway such as Agentgateway performs RFC 8693 token exchange, a standard method for swapping one security token for another.

Jan said the design means agents do not see user tokens, and MCP servers can focus on tools rather than OAuth 2.1 plumbing. The project also aims to connect fragmented identity and authorization systems, centralize tool approvals and maintain audit logs.

The current feature set focuses on on-behalf-of, or OBO, use cases, where a human delegates work to an agent. Jan said planned work includes support for headless agents invoked by machines and intent-based authorization, but the post did not give release dates.

The GitHub repository showed 265 commits, 116 branches and 143 tags, with the latest listed commit dated Nov. 6. Local testing instructions tell developers to clone the repository and run “just compose-up-detached.”