Week of August 3 -- 9, 2026

This week marked a massive leap forward for Scion’s production readiness, headlined by an end-to-end security and identity federation overhaul that includes OIDC provider capabilities, tiered agent authorization roles, and multi-issuer OIDC logins. Alongside these security enhancements, the platform introduced a comprehensive observability suite featuring real-time diagnostic logs, active health-monitoring alerts, and server-side OTel tracing. Additionally, a redesigned user onboarding flow and major high-availability updates to the A2A Protocol Bridge solidify Scion’s capability to run at enterprise scale.

⭐ Highlights

1. Identity Federation, OIDC Agent Identity, and Tiered Authorization Roles

Scion underwent a comprehensive enterprise-grade security redesign this week, introducing tiered agent authorization roles (none, readonly, baseline, full) with strict sub-agent role inheritance to prevent privilege escalation. Concurrently, the platform deployed multi-issuer OIDC federation authentication with RS256 JWKS caching to allow external system credentials to authenticate. Finally, the Hub became an OIDC Identity Provider itself, enabling running agents to retrieve signed OIDC identity tokens and authenticate directly with external systems like Google Cloud WIF, HashiCorp Vault, and AWS IRSA.

2. Integrated Observability, Live Diagnostics, and Health Monitoring

Monitoring and maintaining Scion became significantly more powerful with the rollout of integrated real-time diagnostics and active health-monitoring systems. A new diagnostics dashboard aggregates log streams across the Hub, Broker, and individual agents in real time, backed by a comprehensive Cloud Logging cleanup that deduplicates entries and links trace IDs. This is paired with an active health dashboard, scion doctor checks, Cloud Monitoring alert integrations, and server-side OpenTelemetry tracing that propagates spans across all Hub and Broker request handlers.

3. Overhauled User Invitations & Unified Admin UI

The platform’s user membership and onboarding model has been refactored to replace the legacy email allow-list with a native invited status integrated directly into the User entity, eliminating deadlock issues. Supported by new admin API endpoints for single and bulk user invitations (supporting up to 1,000 imports via CSV or JSON), the release also delivers a unified admin Users dashboard. This new dashboard features real-time status badges, filtering options, an interactive invite dialog, and context-sensitive row actions to manage the full active, suspended, or invited user lifecycle.

4. High-Availability A2A Protocol Bridge and GKE/IAP Support

The A2A Protocol Bridge achieved full admin UI and visual project exposure editing, while simultaneously evolving to support high availability (HA) via a leaderless, multi-replica architecture. To streamline container deployments on Google Cloud Run, the bridge now utilizes h2c port multiplexing to route both HTTP A2A and gRPC Broker traffic on a single, shared port. Additionally, preflight audience validation was updated to support GKE/GCLB IAP audience formats, enabling robust, HA Hub deployments on GKE.

🔐 Auth & Security

OIDC identity federation: Deployed multi-issuer OIDC authentication feature-gated behind federation.enabled, allowing external identities to authenticate via trusted tokens with pinned RS256 JWKS caching.
OIDC Identity Provider: Enabled the Hub to act as an OIDC identity provider, publishing standard discovery and JWKS endpoints and adding a CLI command (sciontool identity-token) to generate signed, short-lived JWTs for secure access to external resources like Vault or GCP WIF.
Federation configuration UI: Built a dedicated admin UI for real-time federation management, allowing issuer CRUD, semantic validation, and lock-free atomic.Pointer hot-reloading of the federation authenticator.
Tiered agent roles: Introduced a secure authorization lattice (none/readonly/baseline/full) with CLI and UI configuration, and implemented a fail-loud sub-agent check to ensure parent agents cannot escalate children’s roles.
Agent runtime secrets API: Shipped project-scoped secret retrieval endpoints with matching scion and sciontool CLI commands, allowing running agents to securely query runtime environment secrets.
Antigravity ADC authentication: Added application default credentials (ADC) support under the vertex-ai service configuration using the AGY_ADC_AUTH flag, while maintaining the keyring flow for standard tokens.
Cross-user task data leak fix: Patched a security issue in the A2A Bridge where ScopedTaskStore keyed ownership on the project:agent route without validating caller identity, now incorporating UserID in the owner key.

📊 Observability & Diagnostics

Unified diagnostics dashboard: Rolled out a real-time log viewer in the Hub UI featuring SSE-based log streaming, level filtering, search, and direct navigation links to Google Cloud Logging.
Active health monitoring: Introduced automated diagnostic checks via scion doctor, 15 Cloud Monitoring alert policies, 4 uptime checks, and an admin UI health summary page.
Server-side OTel tracing: Implemented end-to-end OpenTelemetry tracing across the Hub and Broker request handlers, enabling operation-level spans and cross-component trace propagation.
Cloud Logging optimization: Swept logging behavior to prevent duplicate stdout logs on Cloud Run, scope diagnostics filters to Scion-specific names, clean up legacy tags, and attach trace links for integrated debugging.
Hermes web dashboard: Package-integrated the Hermes dashboard to auto-start on port 9119 as an internal Scion service, auto-exposed through the Hub reverse proxy.

👥 User Onboarding & Management

Invite-only membership refactor: Replaced the legacy email allow-list with a native invited status in the User entity, resolving registration deadlocks and enabling automatic status transitions on first login.
Single and bulk invitation APIs: Added administrative endpoints to invite single users or batch-import up to 1,000 users via CSV or JSON, complete with audit event logging.
Unified user management UI: Delivered an admin Users dashboard that displays status badges (invited/active/suspended), filters, and contextual actions, replacing the legacy allow-list tab.

🌉 A2A Protocol Bridge

Visual exposure editor: Completed Phase 4 of the A2A Bridge admin integration, introducing an interactive visual editor for managing project and agent exposures with real-time validation.
Leaderless high-availability: Upgraded the A2A Bridge with a stateless, interchangeable multi-replica architecture that requires no leader election or instance tracking to function.
Single-port multiplexing: Deployed h2c port multiplexing to dynamically route both HTTP A2A and gRPC Broker traffic on a single port, simplifying Google Cloud Run deployments.
JSON-RPC interface configuration: Added automated JSON-RPC transport registration to generated agent cards, resolving an issue where the a2a-go SDK clients were blocked by missing interfaces.
Dev-mode rebuild target: Added a local developer target (make a2a-bridge) and automated catalog descriptions to streamline development and setup.

🛠️ Hub & Project Management

Managed project templates: Shipped full CRUD, SDK, CLI, and UI support for hub-level project templates, including a Git remote override feature to allow users to provide their own repositories.
Configurable auto-suspend threshold: Added a customizable stalled_threshold lifecycle setting, validated down to a 2-minute minimum, with matching admin UI inputs and JSON schema support.
Administrative Hub restart: Deployed a “Restart Hub” action on the admin maintenance page that triggers a fire-and-forget systemd restart of the Hub service.
Remote hub shadowing: Added scion hub shadow and unshadow commands to link local directories to remote Hub projects, enabling CLI actions on workstations without running a local broker.
Configurable default agent roles: Added default agent role configuration at both the Hub and project levels, promoting the default role to full and fixing fallback logic.
Two-pass env-gather resolution: Fixed a bug in the create-and-edit UI flow where as_needed env vars like GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT failed to resolve, by introducing a two-pass resolution system.
Directory cleanup API integration: Fixed a bug where deleting a shared directory via the API only removed the database record, now fully cleaning up the host filesystem directories.

🖥️ Web Terminal & UI Improvements

Web terminal file uploads: Added drag-and-drop file uploads (up to 50MB per file, 100MB total) directly into the web terminal, automatically quoting and inserting the container paths.
Agent graph layout options: Added left-to-right horizontal graph rendering, keyboard shortcuts, segmented toolbar controls, and corrected arrowhead alignment geometry.
Harness configuration parallel refresh: Added a “Refresh All from Source” button to parallelize harness catalog reimporting, complete with per-row progress indicators.
Clearable agent limits: Restored the ability to clear numeric agent execution limits (like max turns or duration) back to null value payloads.

🔌 Chat Integrations & Broker Plugins

Discord /scion secret commands: Rolled out a slash command for listing, getting, setting (via modal), and deleting project secrets securely from Discord using HMAC-signed Hub API requests.
Chat terminal commands: Added a /scion terminal slash command to Discord and Telegram that resolves agent names via the Hub API and returns the direct web terminal URL.
Inbound attachment routing: Standardized path separators and routed inbound attachments through shared directory infrastructure, resolving delivery failures in isolated workspaces.
Broker plugin restart fix: Resolved a P0 bootstrap race condition that caused the Discord plugin to crash on Hub restarts, fixing double-dial stalls and goroutine leaks.
Message broker type reconciliation: Replaced startup-only message broker type loading with a full reconciliation routine, preventing plugins from silently losing message routing on updates.

⚙️ Infrastructure & Database Stability

Database upgrade crash-loop fixes: Added pre-migration backfills for null scope_id values and pre-migration deduplication of unique constraint policies to prevent upgrade failures on Postgres.
Advisory lock collision resolution: Fixed a lock key collision where cache eviction and Telegram webhook handlers both attempted to acquire the same Postgres advisory lock.
Thick workstation base image: Built and verified a Google Cloud Workstations-based base image variant featuring an intermediate thick-prep layer, verified for amd64 architecture.
Cloud Build pattern fix: Anchored the .gcloudignore internal/ exclusion pattern to the repository root, preventing transitively excluding essential A2A Bridge internal packages.