Enhancing security of backend connectivity with OpenID Connect (OIDC)

This post introduces Vercel's support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) Federation, enabling developers to replace long-lived credentials with short-lived, RSA-signed JWTs for external requests in Vercel Functions and builds. It details how Vercel acts as an Identity Provider (IdP) to issue verifiable tokens that can be used to authenticate with third-party services like AWS. The post contrasts the security risks of static, long-lived credentials with the benefits of OIDC, such as automated token issuance, rotation, and reduced attack surface. It provides a code example demonstrating how to use the `@vercel/functions/oidc` package to fetch AWS credentials dynamically using a role ARN and a Vercel-provided OIDC token.