diff --git a/docs/secret-backends.md b/docs/secret-backends.md
index d53d358..78df3bf 100644
--- a/docs/secret-backends.md
+++ b/docs/secret-backends.md
@@ -118,8 +118,110 @@ That's the whole point of keeping plaintext around — it's the trust root:
    token itself. DB access is now equivalent to OpenBao token access (a single
    key), not equivalent to all API keys in the system.
 
-Follow-up work (not shipped yet) replaces static token auth with Kubernetes
-ServiceAccount auth so no bootstrap token is needed at all.
+#### Kubernetes ServiceAccount auth (no bootstrap token)
+
+`auth: kubernetes` removes the chicken-and-egg entirely: mcpd exchanges its
+projected ServiceAccount JWT for an OpenBao token at
+`auth/<authMount>/role/<role>`, so there is no static credential in the database
+at all. The token is cached for its lease and re-minted lazily with a 60s grace
+window.
+
+```yaml
+kind: secretbackend
+name: bao-k8s
+type: openbao
+isDefault: true
+config:
+  url: https://bao.example
+  auth: kubernetes
+  role: mcpctl
+  authMount: kubernetes-worker0   # defaults to `kubernetes`
+```
+
+Note that the daily **rotator does not apply** to these backends — there is no
+stored token to rotate. That has a consequence for monitoring, see below.
+
+## Reliability
+
+Remote backends are network dependencies on the critical path of nearly
+everything: server env resolution, LLM api keys, chat, git providers, code
+repos, webhooks. Three mechanisms keep an outage from cascading.
+
+### Request hardening
+
+Every call carries a timeout (default 5s) and retries `5xx`/`429`/network
+failures with full-jitter exponential backoff (3 attempts). A **sealed** OpenBao
+answers `503`, so this covers unseal windows and failovers.
+
+The `403` path is separate and deliberately single-shot: the driver purges its
+cached token, re-authenticates and retries **once**. That is a credential
+refresh, not a backend-unavailable condition — looping on it would hide a
+genuinely revoked grant.
+
+### Value cache with stale-while-error
+
+Resolved values are cached per backend (default TTL 5 minutes, LRU-bounded).
+Past the TTL the backend is always consulted; if it fails *as a transport
+failure*, the last known-good value is served instead of throwing.
+
+| Failure | Behaviour |
+|---|---|
+| Backend unreachable / timeout / exhausted 5xx | Serve last known-good, mark degraded, log `BACKEND_UNREACHABLE` once |
+| Secret deleted (404) | **Evict and throw.** Never served stale — that would resurrect a revoked credential |
+| 403 after a token refresh | Throw. Revoked grants must stay loud |
+| Nothing cached yet | Throw |
+
+The stale window is unbounded on purpose: a cap would mean a long outage
+eventually takes mcpd down anyway.
+
+`plaintext` backends are not cached — their `read()` is an identity function
+over the row the caller already supplied.
+
+**Cold cache is the known gap.** If mcpd restarts *while* the backend is
+unreachable, nothing has a last-known-good value and secret-bearing servers fail
+to start. That is deliberate: booting a server with an empty credential is worse
+(gitea-mcp once ran for weeks with an empty `GITEA_ACCESS_TOKEN`, answering
+`tools/list` and reporting healthy while every authenticated call failed). mcpd
+mitigates it by warming the cache at boot — one read per referenced secret — so
+an outage that starts *after* startup is fully absorbed.
+
+### Health: `live` vs `ready`
+
+```bash
+curl $MCPD/api/v1/secretbackends/<id>/health
+```
+
+```json
+{ "live": true, "liveDetail": "active",
+  "ready": false, "readyDetail": "OpenBao list: HTTP 403 permission denied",
+  "cache": { "entries": 9, "servingStale": 0 },
+  "rotation": { "rotatable": false, "lastRotationError": null } }
+```
+
+- **`live`** — unauthenticated `sys/health`. Distinguishes *down* from *sealed*
+  from *standby*.
+- **`ready`** — a real read with our credentials.
+
+The two are separate because `live && !ready` is a distinct, important state: a
+re-initialised OpenBao hands back valid-looking tokens that grant nothing.
+Collapsing them into one boolean is what let that go unnoticed for four days.
+
+`mcpctl status` renders the probe directly:
+
+```
+Secrets:    bao-k8s* ✓ reachable, default ✓ reachable
+Secrets:    bao-k8s* ⚠ degraded — serving 7 cached secret(s)
+Secrets:    bao-k8s* ✗ unreachable: sealed
+Secrets:    bao-k8s* ✗ auth failed: HTTP 403 permission denied
+Secrets:    bao-k8s* ? unknown
+```
+
+> **Historical note.** This verdict used to come solely from
+> `tokenMeta.lastRotationError`, which only the rotator writes — and the rotator
+> skips `auth: kubernetes` backends. The Secrets line was therefore *incapable*
+> of going red for a k8s-auth backend, and reported OpenBao healthy while it was
+> unreachable. `?` (probe failed) renders yellow, never green: not knowing is not
+> health.
 
 ## Migration — `mcpctl migrate secrets`
 
diff --git a/src/mcplocal/tests/smoke/secret-resilience.smoke.test.ts b/src/mcplocal/tests/smoke/secret-resilience.smoke.test.ts
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..358bf84
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/mcplocal/tests/smoke/secret-resilience.smoke.test.ts
@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
+/**
+ * Smoke tests: secret-backend health honesty + value caching, against live mcpd.
+ *
+ * Covers the two behaviours that unit tests cannot prove, because both are
+ * about what the REAL backend and the REAL CLI do together:
+ *
+ *   1. `mcpctl status` reports a probed verdict, not a hard-coded tick. The bug
+ *      being guarded is that the verdict used to come from
+ *      `tokenMeta.lastRotationError`, which a `kubernetes`-auth backend never
+ *      writes — so the line was structurally incapable of going red.
+ *   2. The value cache does not corrupt reads, and a delete really evicts.
+ *
+ * Deliberately does NOT take the real backend down. Simulating an outage
+ * against shared infrastructure to satisfy a test would be worse than the bug.
+ *
+ * Target: mcpd direct (`--direct`), same skip-if-unreachable discipline as the
+ * other smokes here.
+ *
+ * Run with: pnpm test:smoke
+ */
+import { describe, it, expect, beforeAll, afterAll } from 'vitest';
+import http from 'node:http';
+import https from 'node:https';
+import { execSync } from 'node:child_process';
+
+const MCPD_URL = process.env.MCPD_URL ?? 'https://mcpctl.ad.itaz.eu';
+const SECRET_NAME = `smoke-cache-${Date.now().toString(36)}`;
+
+interface CliResult { code: number; stdout: string; stderr: string }
+
+function run(args: string): CliResult {
+  try {
+    return { code: 0, stdout: execSync(`mcpctl --direct ${args}`, { encoding: 'utf-8', timeout: 30_000, stdio: ['ignore', 'pipe', 'pipe'] }).trim(), stderr: '' };
+  } catch (err) {
+    const e = err as { status?: number; stdout?: Buffer | string; stderr?: Buffer | string };
+    return {
+      code: e.status ?? 1,
+      stdout: e.stdout ? String(e.stdout) : '',
+      stderr: e.stderr ? String(e.stderr) : '',
+    };
+  }
+}
+
+function healthz(url: string, timeoutMs = 5000): Promise<boolean> {
+  return new Promise((resolve) => {
+    const parsed = new URL(`${url.replace(/\/$/, '')}/healthz`);
+    const driver = parsed.protocol === 'https:' ? https : http;
+    const req = driver.get(
+      { hostname: parsed.hostname, port: parsed.port || (parsed.protocol === 'https:' ? 443 : 80), path: parsed.pathname, timeout: timeoutMs },
+      (res) => { resolve((res.statusCode ?? 500) < 500); res.resume(); },
+    );
+    req.on('error', () => resolve(false));
+    req.on('timeout', () => { req.destroy(); resolve(false); });
+  });
+}
+
+let mcpdUp = false;
+
+describe('secret resilience smoke', () => {
+  beforeAll(async () => {
+    mcpdUp = await healthz(MCPD_URL);
+    if (!mcpdUp) {
+      // eslint-disable-next-line no-console
+      console.warn(`\n  ○ secret resilience smoke: skipped — ${MCPD_URL}/healthz unreachable. Set MCPD_URL to override.\n`);
+    }
+  }, 20_000);
+
+  afterAll(() => {
+    if (!mcpdUp) return;
+    run(`delete secret ${SECRET_NAME}`);
+  });
+
+  it('status reports a probed backend verdict, not an unconditional tick', () => {
+    if (!mcpdUp) return;
+    const result = run('status');
+    expect(result.code, result.stderr).toBe(0);
+    const line = result.stdout.split('\n').find((l) => l.startsWith('Secrets:'));
+    expect(line, 'status must include a Secrets: line').toBeDefined();
+    // The verdict must be one the live probe can produce. A bare "name ✓" with
+    // no qualifier is the OLD rendering and means the probe was not consulted.
+    expect(line).toMatch(/reachable|degraded|unreachable|auth failed|unknown/);
+  });
+
+  it('reports live and ready separately per backend in JSON output', () => {
+    if (!mcpdUp) return;
+    const result = run('status -o json');
+    expect(result.code, result.stderr).toBe(0);
+    const parsed = JSON.parse(result.stdout) as {
+      secretBackends?: Array<{ name: string; healthy: boolean; live: boolean | null; ready: boolean | null }>;
+    };
+    expect(parsed.secretBackends, 'JSON status must carry secretBackends').toBeDefined();
+    for (const b of parsed.secretBackends ?? []) {
+      // Both signals present and independent — not one boolean copied twice.
+      expect(b, `backend ${b.name}`).toHaveProperty('live');
+      expect(b, `backend ${b.name}`).toHaveProperty('ready');
+      expect(b.healthy).toBe(b.live === true && b.ready === true);
+    }
+  });
+
+  it('caching does not corrupt repeated reads, and delete evicts', () => {
+    if (!mcpdUp) return;
+    const created = run(`create secret ${SECRET_NAME} --data TOKEN=cache-probe-value`);
+    expect(created.code, created.stderr).toBe(0);
+
+    // Two reads back-to-back: the second is a cache hit. Both must agree.
+    const first = run(`describe secret ${SECRET_NAME} --show-values`);
+    const second = run(`describe secret ${SECRET_NAME} --show-values`);
+    expect(first.code, first.stderr).toBe(0);
+    expect(second.code, second.stderr).toBe(0);
+    expect(first.stdout).toContain('cache-probe-value');
+    expect(second.stdout).toContain('cache-probe-value');
+
+    // Delete must evict — a cached value surviving a delete is exactly the
+    // "resurrected revoked credential" failure the cache guards against.
+    const deleted = run(`delete secret ${SECRET_NAME}`);
+    expect(deleted.code, deleted.stderr).toBe(0);
+    const after = run(`describe secret ${SECRET_NAME} --show-values`);
+    expect(after.code, 'reading a deleted secret must fail, not serve cache').not.toBe(0);
+  });
+
+  it('exposes the per-backend health endpoint used by status', () => {
+    if (!mcpdUp) return;
+    const backends = run('get secretbackends -o json');
+    expect(backends.code, backends.stderr).toBe(0);
+    const rows = JSON.parse(backends.stdout) as Array<{ id: string; name: string }>;
+    expect(rows.length).toBeGreaterThan(0);
+    // describe must surface the same probe, for every backend type — the old
+    // Token health block was gated on tokenMeta.rotatable and so rendered
+    // nothing at all for kubernetes-auth backends.
+    const described = run(`describe secretbackend ${rows[0]?.name ?? ''}`);
+    expect(described.code, described.stderr).toBe(0);
+  });
+});