The Credential Vault: How Bridge ACE Agents Handle Secrets Safely

The Credential Vault: How Bridge ACE Agents Handle Secrets Safely

AI agents that interact with the real world need credentials — API keys, email passwords, phone numbers, wallet addresses. Storing these securely while making them accessible to agents is a solved problem in Bridge ACE.

The Problem

A marketing agent needs your Twitter API key. A communication agent needs your email password. A trading agent needs exchange credentials. You cannot hardcode these. You cannot pass them in prompts. You need a secure credential store.

Bridge ACE's Solution

The Credential Vault uses Fernet symmetric encryption (AES-128-CBC). Credentials are encrypted at rest in ~/.config/bridge/credentials/.

How Agents Use It

# Store a credential
bridge_credential_store(
    service='twitter',
    key='api_key',
    value='your-api-key-here'
)

# Retrieve it later
bridge_credential_get(
    service='twitter',
    key='api_key'
)

# List available credentials (keys only, not values)
bridge_credential_list()

# Delete when no longer needed
bridge_credential_delete(
    service='twitter',
    key='api_key'
)

Security Model

• Encrypted at rest — Fernet encryption, key derived from BRIDGE_CRED_KEY environment variable
• Per-service files — Google, GitHub, email, wallet, phone, custom categories
• Access control — agents can only read credentials they created (management agents can read all)
• No logging — credential values never appear in logs or message history
• File permissions — 600 (owner-only read/write)

Combined With Approval Gates

When an agent uses a credential to perform an action — say, sending an email with stored SMTP credentials — the Approval Gate still triggers. You approve the action, not the credential access.

This separation means: agents can access their tools, but you control what they do with them.

Why This Matters

AI agent frameworks that ignore credential management force users into unsafe patterns: hardcoded keys, env vars in prompts, credentials in chat history. Bridge ACE treats credentials as first-class citizens of the platform.

Open Source

git clone https://github.com/Luanace-lab/bridge-ide.git

GitHub: github.com/Luanace-lab/bridge-ide