AIP: Agent Identity Protocol for Verifiable Delegation Across MCP and A2A

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24775v1
• Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:45:37 GMT
• Title: AIP: Agent Identity Protocol for Verifiable Delegation Across MCP and A2A
• Abstract summary: Invocation-Bound Capability Tokens (IBCTs) fuse identity, authorization, and provenance binding into a single append-only token chain.<n>We provide reference implementations in Python and Rust with full cross-language interoperability.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI agents increasingly call tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and delegate to other agents via Agent-to-Agent (A2A), yet neither protocol verifies agent identity. A scan of approximately 2,000 MCP servers found all lacked authentication. In our survey, we did not identify a prior implemented protocol that jointly combines public-key verifiable delegation, holder-side attenuation, expressive chained policy, transport bindings across MCP/A2A/HTTP, and provenance-oriented completion records. We introduce Invocation-Bound Capability Tokens (IBCTs), a primitive that fuses identity, attenuated authorization, and provenance binding into a single append-only token chain. IBCTs operate in two wire formats: compact mode (a signed JWT for single-hop cases) and chained mode (a Biscuit token with Datalog policies for multi-hop delegation). We provide reference implementations in Python and Rust with full cross-language interoperability. Compact mode verification takes 0.049ms (Rust) and 0.189ms (Python), with 0.22ms overhead over no-auth in real MCP-over-HTTP deployment. In a real multi-agent deployment with Gemini 2.5 Flash, AIP adds 2.35ms of overhead (0.086% of total end-to-end latency). Adversarial evaluation across 600 attack attempts shows 100% rejection rate, with two attack categories (delegation depth violation and audit evasion through empty context) uniquely caught by AIP's chained delegation model that neither unsigned nor plain JWT deployments detect.

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