OpenPort Protocol: A Security Governance Specification for AI Agent Tool Access

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20196v1
• Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2026 05:16:40 GMT
• Title: OpenPort Protocol: A Security Governance Specification for AI Agent Tool Access
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces OpenPort Protocol, a governance-first specification for exposing application tools through a secure server-side gateway.<n>OpenPort defines authorization-dependent discovery, stable response envelopes with machine-actionable texttagent.* reason codes, and an authorization model combining integration credentials, scoped permissions, and ABAC-style policy constraints.<n>For write operations, OpenPort specifies a risk-gated lifecycle that defaults to draft creation and human review, supports time-bounded auto-execution under explicit policy, and enforces high-risk safeguards including preflight impact binding and idempotency
• Score: 11.289770127178882
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI agents increasingly require direct, structured access to application data and actions, but production deployments still struggle to express and verify the governance properties that matter in practice: least-privilege authorization, controlled write execution, predictable failure handling, abuse resistance, and auditability. This paper introduces OpenPort Protocol (OPP), a governance-first specification for exposing application tools through a secure server-side gateway that is model- and runtime-neutral and can bind to existing tool ecosystems. OpenPort defines authorization-dependent discovery, stable response envelopes with machine-actionable \texttt{agent.*} reason codes, and an authorization model combining integration credentials, scoped permissions, and ABAC-style policy constraints. For write operations, OpenPort specifies a risk-gated lifecycle that defaults to draft creation and human review, supports time-bounded auto-execution under explicit policy, and enforces high-risk safeguards including preflight impact binding and idempotency. To address time-of-check/time-of-use drift in delayed approval flows, OpenPort also specifies an optional State Witness profile that revalidates execution-time preconditions and fails closed on state mismatch. Operationally, the protocol requires admission control (rate limits/quotas) with stable 429 semantics and structured audit events across allow/deny/fail paths so that client recovery and incident analysis are deterministic. We present a reference runtime and an executable governance toolchain (layered conformance profiles, negative security tests, fuzz/abuse regression, and release-gate scans) and evaluate the core profile at a pinned release tag using artifact-based, externally reproducible validation.

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