Inbound Basic Auth deprecation: standardizing ServiceNow authentication patterns in an enterprise

[Jeff Boltz1]

Hello Community,

We're beginning early planning for ServiceNow's announced deprecation of Basic Authentication for inbound integrations and are reviewing the target authentication architecture for a mixed portfolio of existing integrations.

Our current population includes:

- backend/system integrations,

- applications performing activity attributable to individual users,

- and ServiceNow platform identities/components.

ServiceNow provides multiple modern inbound authentication options. Rather than allowing every integration to independently select a replacement, we're considering establishing a small number of supported patterns.

However, we have an important enterprise ownership boundary.

The ServiceNow platform team owns the ServiceNow side of each integration, but enterprise IAM, Cybersecurity, API Architecture, PKI, and machine-identity standards may be owned elsewhere.

Therefore, we're reluctant to declare something like "OAuth Client Credentials is the ServiceNow standard" solely because ServiceNow supports it.

Our emerging approach is:

Enterprise IAM / Cyber / API Architecture

    defines approved authentication patterns

                     |

                     v

ServiceNow Platform Engineering

    determines how ServiceNow implements/supports them

                     |

                     v

Integration owners

    select an approved pattern appropriate to their use case

Possible use-case categories include:

1. Backend machine-to-machine integrations

2. Applications acting on behalf of individual users

3. Federated enterprise identity

4. Certificate/key-based machine authentication

5. ServiceNow platform-specific components

6. Documented exceptions where a product cannot support the preferred enterprise standard

For developers and architects already working through this:

- Has your organization established preferred ServiceNow inbound authentication patterns?

- Did those patterns originate with the ServiceNow team or with enterprise IAM/API security architecture?

- What is your normal machine-to-machine pattern?

- Where are you using Client Credentials versus JWT/key-based authentication?

- Are you using enterprise-issued/federated tokens for ServiceNow inbound APIs?

- Where has mTLS proven preferable?

- How do you handle applications that say they support "OAuth" but only support a flow or implementation that does not align with your current enterprise security standard?

- Who owns client registration, secrets, signing keys, certificates, token issuers, and credential rotation?

- Have ServiceNow-specific limitations caused you to deviate from your enterprise authentication standard?

- How are you testing these patterns across non-production and production environments?

I'm particularly interested in implemented enterprise architectures and the ownership boundaries around them, rather than simply confirming which authentication mechanisms ServiceNow technically supports.

Thanks,

Jeff