What is TrustPlane?
TrustPlane is a machine authorization plane for AI agents, service accounts, partner clients, and internal services. Its operating model is one sentence: control centrally, enforce locally. Two components deliver it — and they are deliberately separate, because enforcement and governance have different owners, different failure modes, and different adoption timing.
TrustPlane Control (governance plane) trust anchors · enrollment · signed policy releases revocation · fleet visibility · audit · RBAC │ │ signed policy and trust material, │ distributed to the fleet ▼ TrustPlane Auth (enforcement plane) verifies each machine request at the boundary, locally, before it reaches the protected serviceTrustPlane Auth: enforcement where traffic enters
Section titled “TrustPlane Auth: enforcement where traffic enters”Auth is the runtime authorization layer. It runs near your protected APIs, tools, and services — as a gateway adapter, sidecar, or middleware — and evaluates each machine request against caller identity, intended action, audience, route, freshness, replay state, and policy before the request reaches the upstream. Decisions are made locally: Auth has no per-request dependency on Control or any hosted service, and it emits decision evidence with stable deny reasons.
Auth is free to use. You can put it in front of one API today with nothing but the docs and the published artifacts. The rest of this Get Started guide does exactly that.
TrustPlane Control: the cockpit for machine access operations
Section titled “TrustPlane Control: the cockpit for machine access operations”Control is the governance plane — the operating layer around Auth and the cockpit for every authorization operation across a fleet: who is trusted, what policy is active, where enforcement is running, what changed, and what must be revoked now. It owns trust anchors and governed enrollment, versioned signed policy releases and their distribution, revocation and propagation tracking, fleet visibility, audit search and evidence, and operator roles.
Control is the enterprise offering, delivered as a managed SaaS subscription. It governs the fleet without entering the request path: Auth keeps enforcing from the signed material it holds even if Control is unreachable — what pauses is management, never traffic.
TrustPlane Edge: Control in your own environment
Section titled “TrustPlane Edge: Control in your own environment”Edge is the self-hosted deployment of Control for organizations that need the governance plane inside their own environment — with advanced and tailored capabilities to match: RBAC and SSO alignment, audit export and retention requirements, deployment design and migration support, and stronger operational and procurement commitments.
Better together
Section titled “Better together”Auth alone is a complete enforcement solution. Control turns the operational work around it from manual procedures into governed workflows:
| Capability | Auth alone | With Control |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime enforcement in your infrastructure | Included | Included |
| Trust anchor and enrollment workflows | Manual (CLI + bundle authoring) | Governed enrollment with approvals |
| Fleet policy distribution | Manual (build, sign, mount) | Versioned signed releases with propagation tracking |
| Revocation | Manual (edit, re-sign, redeploy) | Fast revocation with acknowledgment tracking |
| Audit | Local decision events | Fleet-wide search, evidence, and reporting |
| Operator access | — | Roles and environment separation |
The adoption path follows the same order: start with Auth in front of one API, then add Control when the fleet grows — more services, more environments, more agents, partner clients, or audit requirements. Nothing about starting with Auth has to be redone when Control arrives; Control governs the same bundles, keys, and policies Auth already enforces.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Run Auth now: What is TrustPlane Auth? → Quickstart
- Operate the governance plane: Control Guide
- The growth path in detail: Adoption path