Securing Non-Human Identities in the Age of Agentic AI with Sarah Cecchetti, Director of Product Management at Semperis

 

This episode features Sarah Cecchetti, Director of Product Management at Semperis.

A veteran identity executive, Sarah co-founded IDPro and co-authored NIST SP 800-63-3C Digital Identity Guidelines. She previously led Amazon Cognito as Head of Product at AWS, where she also open-sourced Cedar, the policy language at the center of this conversation.

In this episode, Sarah presents her Bsides Seattle talk “Identity Crisis: IAM’s Wild Ride in the AI Jungle” on why the assumptions that shaped modern identity have been overturned by the pace of agentic AI. She covers where authentication and authorization standards currently fall short for non-human identities and walks through the emerging frameworks the industry is building to fill that gap.

This episode makes the case that natural language safety instructions are not a substitute for provable, external guardrails.