Abstract: A secret management infrastructure federates with a cloud compute platform to store, issue, track and revoke secrets issued to workload instances. A workload instance can be provisioned with a token and can present that token to the secret management infrastructure (SMI) in exchange for a credential. In addition to validating the token itself, the SMI can verify whether the workload instance is entitled to receive the credential based on label match. The label is typically workload operator defined and corresponds to one or more attributes that the workload instance must possess, particularly physical, hardware, or software attributes. Preferably the secret management infrastructure verifies that the workload instance matches the label (that is, it has the necessary attributes) from the control plane of the cloud compute platform, or other source independent of the workload instance.