Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

Abstract:Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms -- such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs -- either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2606.11632 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2606.11632v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11632 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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