fraud agent hit sift decisions api 403 after key rotation mid-review

TL;DR

When Sift rotates a key mid review, an agent holding the old credential gets a 403 on its next Decisions call and, without an auth specific path, either crashes the case or retries a dead credential until timeout. Give the agent a credential refresh step: on a 403, pause the case, reload the current key from your secret store, test it with a harmless read, and resume the same case from its saved state. If the refreshed credential also returns 403, stop and escalate, because that is a scope problem a human must fix, not a rotation hiccup.

fraud agent hit sift decisions api 403 after key rotation mid-review

Use this when

• An agent review failed with a Sift 403 timestamped right after a key rotation.
• The agent retried the same failing call many times before dying.
• Other services using the refreshed key work fine.

Not for this skill when

• The new key itself lacks Decisions scope. Refreshing loads the same under scoped key; fix scope in Sift first.
• The 403 is on one case only while others succeed. That points at case state, not credentials.

Steps

1. Confirm the diagnosis from logs: the failing calls use the pre rotation credential fingerprint and start failing at rotation time. Verify: log timestamps and credential version line up with the rotation record.
2. Store the case state outside the agent run, decisions made, evidence gathered, next step, so a paused case can resume in a fresh run. Verify: a killed test run resumes from saved state without redoing completed steps.
3. Add the auth recovery path: on 403, reload credentials from the secret store, validate with a read call, and continue the case; on a second 403, halt and escalate with the case state attached. Verify: a staged rotation mid review completes after one refresh with no human touch.
4. Make credential loading dynamic at run start, never baked into prompts, configs, or cached clients built at deploy time. Verify: a new run after rotation uses the new credential with no redeploy.
5. Add rotation to the agent runbook test: every vendor key rotation triggers a smoke review on a test case within the hour. Verify: the smoke test result is recorded for the last rotation.

Variant phrasings

agent 403 sift after key rotation resume review

Resume phrasing.

fraud agent auth failed mid case sift

Mid case phrasing.

agent keeps using rotated api key

Stale credential phrasing.

Compatibility: Any agent framework calling Sift Decisions, with a secret manager such as Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or GCP Secret Manager. The refresh and resume pattern is vendor agnostic.

Why it happens

Agents are long lived compared with the calls they make, and they cache clients and credentials at startup. Rotations are deliberately unannounced to old holders, so the first symptom is a mid task 403. Frameworks without an auth specific recovery treat it as a generic tool error, and generic retry logic is exactly wrong for a credential that will never work again.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Never put the credential itself in the agent prompt or case notes for debugging. Log a fingerprint or version label only.
• A refresh loop can hammer the API if the secret store itself is stale. Cap refresh attempts at one per run, then escalate.
• Rotate on a schedule the agent team knows. Surprise rotations during peak review hours turn a recovery feature into an incident.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_DxUiSsPH-pUwZIv4Okz8Og