- Added support in the kubelet's image pull credential tracking for service account-based verification. When an image was pulled using service account credentials via external credential providers, subsequent Pods using the same service account (UID, name, and namespace) could access the cached image without re-authentication for the lifetime of that service account. ([#132771](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132771), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase))...

resource belongs to. ([#43338](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/43338), [@fabianofranz](https://github.com/fabianofranz))

* `--service-account-lookup` now defaults to true, requiring the Secret API object containing the token to exist in order for a service account token to be valid. This enables service account tokens to be revoked by deleting the Secret object containing the token. ([#44071](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44071), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))...

* The `kube-cloud-controller-manager` flag `--service-account-private-key-file` was non-functional and is now deprecated. ([#50289](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/50289), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))
    * The `kube-cloud-controller-manager` flag `--use-service-account-credentials` is now honored consistently, regardless of whether `--service-account-private-key-file` was specified.

  - `--service-account-issuer`, should be set to a URL identifying the API server that will be stable over the cluster lifetime.
  - `--service-account-key-file`, set to one or more files containing one or more public keys used to verify tokens.

* An `automountServiceAccountToken` field was added to ServiceAccount and PodSpec objects. If set to `false` on a pod spec, no service account token is automounted in the pod. If set to `false` on a service account, no service account token is automounted for that service account unless explicitly overridden in the pod spec. ([#37953](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/37953), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

* The `kube-cloud-controller-manager` flag `--service-account-private-key-file` was non-functional and is now deprecated. ([#50289](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/50289), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))
    * The `kube-cloud-controller-manager` flag `--use-service-account-credentials` is now honored consistently, regardless of whether `--service-account-private-key-file` was specified.

[@caesarxuchao](https://github.com/caesarxuchao))

* Using kubectl gcp auth plugin with a Google Service Account to authenticate to a cluster now additionally requests a token with the  "userinfo.email" scope. This way, users can write ClusterRoleBindings/RoleBindings with the email address of the service account directly. (This is a breaking change if the numeric uniqueIDs of the Google service accounts were being used in RBAC role bindings. The behavior can be overridden by explicitly specifying the...

`kube-controller-manager`: The `LegacyServiceAccountTokenCleanUp` feature gate is now `beta` and enabled by default. When enabled, legacy auto-generated service account token secrets are auto-labeled with a `kubernetes.io/legacy-token-invalid-since` label if the credentials have not been used in the time specified by `--legacy-service-account-token-clean-up-period` (defaulting to one year), **and** are referenced from the `.secrets` list of a ServiceAccount object, **and**  are not referenced from pods....

- Added support to the kube-apiserver for an alpha feature enabling external signing of service account tokens and fetching of public verifying keys, by enabling the Alpha `ExternalServiceAccountTokenSigner` feature gate and specifying `--service-account-signing-endpoint`. The flag value can either be the location of a Unix domain socket on a filesystem, or be prefixed with an @ symbol and name a Unix domain socket in the...

- kube-apiserver: `--service-account-max-token-expiration` can now be used in combination with an external token signer `--service-account-signing-endpoint`, as long as the `--service-account-max-token-expiration` is not longer than the external token signer's max expiration. ([#129816](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/129816), [@sambdavidson](h...