Most approaches to AI agents without API keys still put a short-lived credential in agent memory. Riptides goes further: credentials are injected at the Linux kernel for each outbound request, so the agent process never possesses a credential at all. Nothing to leak, nothing to rotate on deploy, nothing to extract under prompt injection.
"A prompt injection caused our agent to dump its environment into a tool call. The OpenAI key was exfiltrated. Our LLM bill spiked overnight. We rotated the key, redeployed every agent that shared it, and spent two days on incident response."
— Head of Platform, Series B AI startup
A crafted prompt causes the agent to leak credentials in output or tool calls. Guardrails can't eliminate it — the credential is still in process memory.
One compromised agent means every agent sharing that key is compromised. Figuring out which agents used it takes days.
A stolen key gets used for crypto prompt farming. The bill arrives as a single line item with no per-agent attribution.
Rotating a key means redeploying every agent that uses it. So rotation gets deferred — and leaked credentials stay valid for months.
Agents make plaintext requests. The kernel module intercepts and injects credentials before the request leaves the host. The agent never sees, stores, or handles any secret.
Point to your credential providers: Kubernetes Secrets, HashiCorp Vault, AWS IAM (via OIDC federation), or any external secret store.
Map which credentials get injected for which agent, to which destinations. Each agent gets its own bindings — no sharing.
When an agent makes an outbound request, the right credential is injected automatically. The agent sends plaintext — the credential never enters its process memory.
The credential is never in the agent's address space. No prompt injection, memory dump, or debug logging can expose it. This isn't defense in depth — it's elimination of the attack surface.
Each agent identity gets its own credential bindings. Agent A uses one API key, Agent B uses another. Revoke one without affecting the others. Attribute costs per agent.
Credentials rotate in the source (Vault, Secrets Manager) and the kernel module picks up new credentials automatically. No agent restart, no config change, no coordination.
No os.getenv(), no secret management SDK. Works with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph, custom frameworks — anything that makes HTTP requests. Learn how →
Start with one agent, one credential. If the kernel module is unavailable, the agent's original credential path still works.
Guardrails try to prevent the agent from being told to leak credentials. But the credential is still in the agent's memory. A novel injection, a memory dump, or a logging misconfiguration bypasses them. Riptides removes the credential from the agent's reach entirely.
A gateway can inject credentials on the way out — but it only covers the LLM call. Agents also reach databases, cloud APIs, and third-party services. A gateway can't sign an AWS SigV4 request or inject a database password. Kernel-level injection covers every outbound connection.
Deploy Riptides and move LLM API keys out of environment variables and into kernel-level injection. The agent code doesn't change — it still makes the same HTTP requests. But the key is no longer in its process, its config, or its logs.
This is the deployment that gets your agent past security review and into production.
| Traditional | Riptides Secretless | |
|---|---|---|
| Where secrets live | Env vars, config files, agent memory | Kernel space only |
| Prompt injection risk | Credential in memory = extractable | Nothing to extract |
| Log exposure | API keys in HTTP logs | Injected after logging layer |
| Blast radius | Shared keys across agents | Unique bindings per agent identity |
| Rotation | Redeploy every agent | Automatic, no restart |
| Code changes | os.getenv(), SDK clients | None |
| Audit posture | "We rotate keys quarterly" | "Credentials never enter agent memory" |
See secretless credential injection for AI agents in practice, with OpenAI API keys issued on demand and injected at the kernel level, never entering agent memory: Supplying Short-Lived OpenAI API Keys to AI Agents with Riptides →
Secretless means AI agents authenticate to external APIs without ever holding API keys or tokens in memory. Credentials are intercepted and injected at the Linux kernel for each individual request, exist only in kernel space for the duration of that request, and are never accessible to the agent process. A compromised agent cannot exfiltrate credentials it never possessed.
The agent makes the API call as normal, without including credentials. The Riptides kernel module intercepts the outbound request, identifies the agent by its SPIFFE identity, retrieves a short-lived credential from the configured secret store, and injects it into the request headers before the packet leaves the host. The agent and its framework are never involved in credential handling.
Any service that authenticates via HTTP headers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and any REST API that uses API keys or bearer tokens. Riptides also supports AWS SigV4 signing for AWS services and federated identity for GCP and Azure.
No. Because injection happens at the kernel, it is invisible to the agent framework. LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, and any other framework continue to operate exactly as they do today. Riptides intercepts at a layer the framework has no visibility into.
Identity, access control, and a full audit trail for every agent and service — enforced on the host, with no code changes. Up and running in an afternoon.