The end of credential sprawl for agents
Vercel has launched Vercel Connect, replacing long-lived tokens with short-lived, scoped credentials for agents to reduce credential sprawl and security risks in production environments.
For years, granting agents access to external services required provisioning long-lived tokens, creating security risks if those tokens were leaked. Vercel Connect, now generally available, replaces these static credentials with runtime-scoped tokens that expire automatically, reducing the attack surface for credential theft. During its public beta, the platform expanded to over 100 connectors, unified their behavior, and added governance features for production use. The shift addresses a growing problem where agents interact with more systems autonomously, compounding the risks of credential leaks and manual rotation processes.
The new system eliminates the need for teams to manage token rotation scripts or share secrets across environments. Instead, each deployment on Vercel carries an OIDC identity, which the SDK uses to request tokens dynamically without additional secrets. Tokens are scoped to specific tasks and expire after use, ensuring nothing remains accessible to attackers. For example, GitHub tokens can be restricted to a single repository with read-only permissions, rather than granting broad organizational access. The open-source GitHub Tools SDK implements this granularity by minting tokens with only the required scopes based on presets like code-review.
Vercel Connect includes over 100 preset connectors for tools like Notion, Shopify, and Workday, as well as managed connectors for Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Salesforce. Custom services can integrate via OAuth or API keys, and any OAuth-capable MCP server can serve as a connector. The platform simplifies discovery and creation through a catalog on the Vercel website, streamlined connector setup, and centralized management via dashboard, CLI, or API. Teams gain visibility into access usage through audit logs, enabling them to track who had access to systems and when, replacing manual investigations across projects and communication threads.
Beyond token management, Vercel Connect handles event-driven workflows without exposing secrets in applications. Triggers forward verified events from providers like Slack to projects, even with Deployment Protection enabled, without requiring bot tokens or webhook secrets in the app. The provider sends the event to Vercel Connect, which verifies the signature server-side, re-attests the event with an OIDC identity, and forwards it securely to the project, completing the loop without lingering credentials.