Hardware-rooted attestation for AI-agent evidence: composing IETF RATS with action evidence packages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00801v1
• Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:01:36 GMT
• Title: Hardware-rooted attestation for AI-agent evidence: composing IETF RATS with action evidence packages
• Abstract summary: Action evidence package (AEP) is a signed, append-only record of what an AI agent did.<n>AEP tells a verifier the story of an action as the agent's own runtime reports it.<n>This note argues that software attestation of this kind is necessary but not sufficient.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: An action evidence package (AEP) is a signed, append-only record of what an AI agent did, who or what authorised the action, and what the outcome was. It is a software-layer artefact: it tells a verifier the story of an action as the agent's own runtime reports it. This note argues that software attestation of this kind is necessary but not sufficient. When a verifier's question shifts from "what does the agent claim it did?" to "did the specific model version the operator claims to have deployed actually produce this output, on unmodified hardware?", the AEP alone cannot answer. The missing element is a hardware root of trust: an attestation that the measured boot and runtime state of the platform match an endorsed reference. The IETF Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) architecture (RFC 9334) and Veraison, an open-source RATS Verifier implementation (Confidential Computing Consortium / Linux Foundation), supply exactly this. We propose a composite attestation: hardware Evidence appraised under RATS, bound to a software AEP. We map a small verifier vocabulary (Authorised / Unauthorised / Indeterminate / Attested / Contested / Expired) onto RATS appraisal outcomes, and demonstrate feasibility with a small executed experiment: on a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM; the swtpm emulator), an output-binding protocol folds the hash of an AEP outcome and a fresh appraiser nonce into an attestation-key-signed quote, with a model-artefact measurement carried in a platform register. A minimal RATS-Verifier stand-in resolves the three platform outcomes as designed -- Attested for a good, fresh quote; Contested when the model measurement is swapped; Expired when a stale quote is replayed -- and rejects a forged AEP outcome bound to a valid quote. The result is a feasibility demonstration on emulated hardware, not a hardware-rooted guarantee.

Related papers

• Zero-Knowledge Predicate Proofs Between AI Agents: A Measured, Cross-Protocol Gateway and the Source-Integrity Gap [0.0]
  Multi-agent AI platforms move quickly from staging to production, but the way agents establish trust remains rudimentary.<n>We take provable data minimisation between agents from proposal to running system.<n>A 32-bit threshold predicate proves in 6.2 ms and verifies in 1.0 ms with a 608-byte Bulletproofs proof.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-30T23:16:17Z)
• Vero: Can AI Agents Build Formally Verified Software Repositories? [45.09790101960906]
  Vero is the first benchmark to evaluate joint implementation and proof at the repository level.<n>It contains 43 multi-module instances from real-world repositories spanning Python, Dafny, Verus, and Coq.<n>To improve benchmark reliability, Vero also includes an audit mechanism where agents are allowed to formally prove unsatisfiability of provided specification.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-13T17:41:27Z)
• A Challenge-Nonce Freshness Gap in Project Veraison's TPM Reference Schemes, Found by Appraising Application-Layer Action Evidence End-to-End [0.0]
  Prior work proposed treating that record as application-layer Evidence under the IETF Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) architecture.<n>We drive an AEP quote, produced on an emulated software TPM, end-to-end through a conformant Project Veraison RATS Verifier.<n>We give an exact, upstreamable two-part fix and validate it end-to-end.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-04T12:14:39Z)
• PhyAgentOS: A Self-Evolving Operating System for Embodied Agents with Decoupled Cognitive Planning and Physical Execution [49.776611937968]
  We present PhyAgentOS, a foundation delivering scheduling, verification, memory, benchmarking, and safety as system-level services.<n>Its Session-Centered treats a session, not an action, as the minimum unit of scheduling, compatibility, supervised execution, evidence collection, and acceptance.<n>SessionVerifier distinguishes execution termination from semantic task completion via evidence-grounded verdicts of success, failure, or replan.<n> Benchmarking reuses the deployment session and verification path, so results trace to real execution.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-18T04:46:53Z)
• Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure [2.124730017640531]
  Sovereign Assurance Boundary is a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority.<n>We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-10T03:49:57Z)
• Proof-Carrying Agent Actions: Model-Agnostic Runtime Governance for Heterogeneous Agent Systems [0.6526824510982799]
  This paper presents Proof-Carrying Agent Actions (PCAA), a runtime-neutral governance model centered on an action certificate.<n>PCAA organizes control around five checkpoints: pre-action admissibility, action open, assumption capture, approval, and outcome closure.<n>We study the model through a reference implementation in a heterogeneous agent control plane and a disclosure-bounded evaluation protocol.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-02T18:10:35Z)
• FIDEM: A Standard-Compliant Framework for Secure Binding of MUD Profiles to IoT Devices [90.91375734523943]
  FIDEM is a standard-compliant framework for securing DHCP-based MUD URL issuance.<n>It provides cryptographic binding between IoT devices and their MUD profiles by leveraging Zero-Knowledge-Proof authentication.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-28T09:16:50Z)
• An Executable Benchmarking Suite for Tool-Using Agents [3.5322131912413908]
  The suite connects WebArena Verified, a SWE-Gym slice with SWE-bench-compatible verification, and MiniWoB++ through common workload adapters.<n>The admitted evidence records latency, invalid-action behavior, patch-generation cost, verifier metadata, replay bindings, and provenance under one auditable contract.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-10T21:24:53Z)
• FactReview: Evidence-Grounded Reviews with Literature Positioning and Execution-Based Claim Verification [57.196748998757954]
  We present FactReview, an evidence-grounded reviewing system that combines claim extraction, literature positioning, and execution-based claim verification.<n>Given a submission, FactReview identifies major claims and reported results, retrieves nearby work to clarify the paper's technical position, and, when code is available, executes the released repository.<n>It then produces a concise review and an evidence report that assigns each major claim one of five labels: Supported, Supported by the paper, Partially supported, In conflict, or Inconclusive.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-05T11:45:22Z)
• TrustMee: Self-Verifying Remote Attestation Evidence [0.7491482431654224]
  We introduce the concept of self-verifying remote attestation evidence.<n>We implement this concept as TrustMee, a platform-agnostic verification driver for the Trustee framework.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-13T17:56:08Z)
• Are You Getting What You Pay For? Auditing Model Substitution in LLM APIs [71.7892165868749]
  Commercial Large Language Model (LLM) APIs create a fundamental trust problem.<n>Users pay for specific models but have no guarantee that providers deliver them faithfully.<n>We formalize this model substitution problem and evaluate detection methods under realistic adversarial conditions.<n>We propose and evaluate the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) as one practical and robust solution.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-07T03:57:41Z)
• FIRE: Fact-checking with Iterative Retrieval and Verification [63.67320352038525]
  FIRE is a novel framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner.<n>It achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times.<n>These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-17T06:44:18Z)
• SEDAT:Security Enhanced Device Attestation with TPM2.0 [0.3007949058551534]
  This paper presents SE DAT, a novel methodology for remote attestation of the device via a security enhanced communication channel. SE DAT provides a way for verifier to get on-demand device integrity and authenticity status via a secure channel. It also enables the verifier to detect counterfeit hardware, change in firmware, and software code on the device.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-01-16T03:41:01Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.