Amazon’s managed API gateway for AWS-native teams exposing and securing REST, WebSocket, and HTTP APIs, with tight integration to Lambda, IAM authorizers, and other AWS services.
AWS API Gateway manages inbound API traffic for AWS-hosted services: routing requests, enforcing IAM authorization or custom authorizers, throttling, and integrating with Lambda and other backend services. That is the right architecture for protecting AWS-hosted APIs on the provider side. The gap appears on the caller side. AWS API Gateway verifies that an inbound request carries valid credentials, but it has no visibility into the identity of the workload or AI agent that generated those credentials before the call was made. If a workload is using a static IAM access key or a long-lived token, the gateway validates the credential without knowing whether the caller is who it should be or whether its runtime environment is healthy. Aembit operates at the caller layer. Before the request reaches API Gateway, Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity and issues a short-lived, identity-bound token. The two tools protect opposite ends of the same API call, and organizations running AWS API Gateway can use Aembit to harden the caller-side identity model without replacing their gateway infrastructure.
Aembit does not replace AWS API Gateway. AWS API Gateway handles managed inbound API traffic and AWS-native authorization that Aembit is not designed to perform.
Aembit issues short-lived, workload-bound JWTs that AWS API Gateway validates through its JWT authorizer or a custom Lambda authorizer. When a workload or AI agent needs to call an API protected by AWS API Gateway, Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity and issues a credential bound to that identity. The gateway receives the token, validates it, and applies its routing and throttling policies.
The result is that the token arriving at API Gateway carries attested workload identity rather than a static access key or reusable secret. The workload never stores a credential, and the token expires after a short TTL. Organizations already using API Gateway with JWT authorizers can configure Aembit as the token issuer without changing their gateway authorization configuration significantly.
AWS API Gateway and Aembit protect opposite ends of the same API call.
AWS API Gateway handles inbound traffic management: routing API calls to Lambda functions or other AWS backends, enforcing IAM-based or custom authorization, throttling requests, and producing CloudWatch logs and metrics. For API calls originating inside AWS infrastructure, Gateway’s IAM integration provides solid authorization. For calls from outside AWS, or from AI agents operating across cloud boundaries, the credential at the gateway boundary says nothing about the health or identity of the caller’s runtime.
Aembit operates at the caller side. Before the request is made, Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity, evaluates conditional access policy, and injects a short-lived token. The gateway sees a time-limited, identity-bound credential rather than a static key.
For AI agent use cases in particular, Aembit provides the caller-side context that API Gateway cannot: the agent was attested at its specific runtime environment, under a specific access policy, at a specific time. That context travels with the token.
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