jargon

Platform & DevOps·Secrets, identity and the supply chain

your pipeline swaps its own identity for a short-lived role in the target account, and that swap is logged.

Role assumption

Also calledassume role, role chaining, delegated access

Exchanging one identity for temporary credentials under a different role, typically to cross an account or trust boundary. It is the standard way to avoid storing credentials for other environments, and it makes the trust relationship explicit and auditable. The trust policy on the target role is the real control — an over-broad one lets anything in the source account assume it, which is how one team's compromise becomes another's.

Commonly confused with