#Enable the Secure Profile

The Kagenti Operator ships a core profile by default — agent enrollment and discovery, with no identity sidecars. The secure profile adds zero-trust workload identity (SPIRE mTLS), OAuth2/JWT authentication (Keycloak), and an Istio ambient mesh, all enforced by an AuthBridge sidecar injected into every enrolled workload. This guide turns it on. For the architecture and the reasoning, see Security Architecture.

#Prerequisites

The secure profile depends on cluster components that are not part of the core install. Install them first, in this order:

1. cert-manager — webhook and CA certificates.
2. SPIRE — issues workload SVIDs. Provides the csi.spiffe.io CSI driver and a trust bundle ConfigMap (spire-bundle). Note its trust domain (e.g. kagenti.local).
3. Keycloak — an instance reachable in-cluster, with a keycloak-initial-admin secret in its namespace and the token-exchange feature enabled.
4. Istio (ambient) — ztunnel + istio-cni for namespace-level mTLS.

#1. Enable the secure profile on the operand

Patch the Kagenti custom resource to turn on sidecar injection and point it at your Keycloak and SPIRE trust domain:

apiVersion: kagenti.alauda.io/v1alpha1
kind: Kagenti
metadata:
  name: kagenti
  namespace: kagenti-system
spec:
  featureGates:
    globalEnabled: true
    injectTools: true
  authbridgeConfig:
    enabled: true
  keycloak:
    publicUrl: http://keycloak-service.keycloak.svc.cluster.local:8080
  defaults:
    spiffe:
      trustDomain: kagenti.local
    images:
      envoyProxy: <registry>/authbridge-envoy:<tag>
      authbridge: <registry>/authbridge:<tag>
      authbridgeLite: <registry>/authbridge-lite:<tag>
      proxyInit: <registry>/proxy-init:<tag>

When authbridgeConfig.enabled is true and a Keycloak instance already exists in the configured namespace, the operator automatically imports the kagenti realm into it (a KeycloakRealmImport carrying the platform client and the kagenti-platform-audience scope) — no manual realm setup is required.

#2. Opt namespaces into the secure profile

The operator only manages identity in namespaces that are explicitly opted in. Label every namespace that runs secured agents or tools:

kubectl label namespace <agent-namespace> kagenti-enabled=true

#3. Deploy a secured agent

Continue to Demo with Secure Profile for the full weather-agent walk-through under the secure profile. Deployment YAML is the same as the core-profile quick start — no secure-profile-specific fields are required in the Deployment or AgentRuntime, because the AuthBridge webhook does all the wiring at admission time based on the Kagenti operand and the namespace label. It injects an authbridge-proxy sidecar and a SPIRE SVID into each enrolled pod, and the operator registers a Keycloak client per workload.

For a locked-down variant that puts AuthBridge on the tool too and exchanges tokens between agent and tool, see Demo Advanced: AuthBridge on the Tool with Token Exchange.

#4. Verify

# AuthBridge sidecar injected (app container + authbridge-proxy)
kubectl get pod -n <ns> -l kagenti.io/type=agent \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.containers[*].name}{"\n"}'

# SPIRE SVID delivered to the sidecar
kubectl exec -n <ns> <agent-pod> -c authbridge-proxy -- ls -l /opt/svid.pem

# Keycloak client registered (credentials secret created + mounted)
kubectl get secret -n <ns> | grep kagenti-keycloak-client

The mesh now enforces authentication. An unauthenticated request is rejected:

{"error":"auth.unauthorized","message":"missing Authorization header","plugin":"jwt-validation"}

A successful request must carry a valid Keycloak access token whose audience matches the realm issuer — obtain one with a client_credentials grant using the workload's registered client (<namespace>/<workload>, secret from kagenti-keycloak-client-credentials-*) and send it as Authorization: Bearer <token>.