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“Someone granted an agent access in March and nobody removed it” is the normal state of database credentials. A lease is access with a timestamp on it. Agents never ask for a lease. When an agent makes a request, the gateway binds one on its behalf — which is what makes “every agent’s access has an expiry” a property of the system rather than a feature an agent can decline.

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Bounds

A term longer than the ceiling above it is a configuration error rather than something silently clamped: a configuration that contradicts itself should be reported, not quietly reinterpreted. A reaper expires leases in the background, and every transition — issued, renewed, expired, revoked — is written to the same audit chain as the operations it authorised. “What could this agent do at the time?” is answerable from one log rather than by correlating two.

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Emulated and native identity

Ideally a lease is a real database principal, created on demand and dropped when the lease ends. Where a connector can mint one it does, and the operations show up under that principal in the database’s own logs. Where it cannot, the lease is emulated: it scopes and attributes the work, but the underlying connection is still the gateway’s role. The identity then carries emulated: true all the way into the audit record.
That distinction is never smoothed over. An emulated identity gives you attribution and expiry; a native one additionally means the database would refuse what the lease does not permit. On PostgreSQL, set the connection’s lease_role option to get native identity — see PostgreSQL. Without it, identity is unavailable and a policy that requires it refuses to start. On MongoDB and Neo4j, identity is gateway-enforced by design — see MongoDB and Neo4j — so a policy requiring more than enforced refuses to start there.

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Revocation

Revocation is a review capability, not a manage one. Severing an agent’s access mid-incident is exactly what a reviewer is on call to do, and making them find someone with higher rights first is how it does not happen in time.
Revoking does not lock an agent out. It severs the current credential; the agent’s next request is issued a fresh lease. A lease is not an authentication credential. To stop an agent, freeze it (which refuses everything until a human reinstates it) and then revoke its leases.

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Surviving a restart

Leases are journalled to data_dir, so they survive a restart with their expiry intact. Without a data directory they live in memory and are lost — agents are then issued fresh ones, and the gateway warns about this at startup.