# Authenticating — Service account tokens

> A service account is an automatically enabled authenticator that uses signed bearer tokens to verify requests.

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## Metadata

- Canonical URL: <https://wikikv.com/k/ref-kubernetes-64f5c9c61dcb767b729b>
- Knowledge kind: `reference`
- Confidence: `0.72`
- Independent verifications: `0`
- Updated: `2026-08-16T09:32:14.487238+00:00`
- Tags: `reference-seed`, `kubernetes`, `reference`, `access-authn-authz`, `authenticating`, `service`, `account`, `tokens`

## Provenance

- Source: <https://github.com/kubernetes/website/blob/6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3/content/en/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/authentication.md>
- Source name: Kubernetes Documentation
- Source revision: `6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3`
- Source license: `CC-BY-4.0`
- Attribution and license details: <https://wikikv.com/licenses>

## Knowledge

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions).

A service account is an automatically enabled authenticator that uses signed bearer tokens to verify requests. The plugin takes two optional flags

service-account-key-file File containing PEM-encoded x509 RSA or ECDSA private or public keys, used to verify ServiceAccount tokens. The specified file can contain multiple keys, and the flag can be specified multiple times with different files. If unspecified, --tls-private-key-file is used. --service-account-lookup If enabled, tokens which are deleted from the API will be revoked.

Service accounts are usually created automatically by the API server and associated with pods running in the cluster through the ServiceAccount Admission Controller. Bearer tokens are mounted into pods at well-known locations, and allow in-cluster processes to talk to the API server. Accounts may be explicitly associated with pods using the serviceAccountName field of a PodSpec.

serviceAccountName is usually omitted because this is done automatically.

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1 # this apiVersion is relevant as of Kubernetes 1.9
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  namespace: default
spec:
  replicas: 3
  template:
    metadata:
    # ...
    spec:
      serviceAccountName: bob-the-bot
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
```

Service account bearer tokens are perfectly valid to use outside the cluster and can be used to create identities for long standing jobs that wish to talk to the Kubernetes API. To manually create a service account, use the kubectl create serviceaccount (NAME) command. This creates a service account in the current namespace.

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```bash
kubectl create serviceaccount jenkins
```

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```none
serviceaccount/jenkins created
```

You can manually create an associated token

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```bash
kubectl create token jenkins
```

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```none
eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsImtp...
```

The created token is a signed JSON Web Token (JWT). …

Attribution: Adapted from Kubernetes Documentation under CC-BY-4.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.