Facilitating the generation of ephemeral credentials and verification thereof within a distributed storage system is provided herein. Based on a request for ephemeral credentials from a first account client to a first node of a first storage instance of a distributed system, generating the ephemeral credential comprising a session token and a secret session key for the first account client by a method that derives the secret session key using a first account private key and a first storage instance public key. This session token along with a signature generated using the secret session key of the ephemeral credential is subsequently used to make further requests to a second node of a second storage instance of the distributed system where the secret session key is independently derived using information in the request and the previously shared first account private key to verify the signature in the request.