Authority Documents and Scoped Authority for Agent-Action Evidence

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶

This Internet-Draft will expire on 20 January 2027.¶

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This document follows the distinction between VERIFIED and ACCEPTED. Verification establishes cryptographic and structural facts given a key. Acceptance is a relying-party decision about which keys, issuers, authority sources, and policies are admissible. Existing systems use certificates, federation metadata, trust bundles, transparency services, and deployment configuration for portions of that decision. Agent-action evidence profiles still need a concrete way to bind those trust inputs to the issuer key and to the human authority being relied upon.¶

The design is deliberately not a universal public-key infrastructure. The relying party selects its trust anchors and acceptance policy. Domain control, log inclusion, and endorsement are evidence inputs, not authority by themselves. The goal is a reproducible answer to two narrower questions: which evidence key was valid at issuance, and what scoped authority did the approving subject hold for the exact action under review?¶

2. The Authority Document (EP-AUTHORITY-DOC-v1)

An authority document is a JSON object, served from the organization's own origin (RECOMMENDED: /.well-known/ep-authority.json) and registrable to a transparency service:¶

{
  "@version": "EP-AUTHORITY-DOC-v1",
  "org": { "name": "...", "domain": "acme.example" },
  "seq": 3,
  "prev_doc_digest": "sha256:<core digest of doc seq 2>",
  "root_key": "<b64url SPKI>",
  "issuer_keys": [
    { "kid": "<hex>", "key": "<b64url SPKI>",
      "usages": ["evidence_issuer", "authority_proof_issuer"],
      "valid_from": "...", "valid_to": "...",
      "revoked_at": "<OPTIONAL>" }
  ],
  "issued_at": "...",
  "sig": "<root_key over the canonical core>",
  "continuity_sig": "<by a key from the PREVIOUS doc>",
  "endorsements": [ { "by_org": "...", "by_key": "...",
                      "doc_digest": "...", "sig": "..." } ]
}

The signed core is the document without sig, continuity_sig, and endorsements; its canonical digest is the document's identity. Endorsements are countersignatures over that digest by OTHER authorities -- third-party attestations that ride with the document without being part of it.¶

3. Scoped Authority Proof (EP-AUTHORITY-PROOF-v1)

An accepted issuer key with the authority_proof_issuer usage MAY sign a snapshot of one subject's authority. The proof records what the authority source asserted at issuance; it does not grant authority merely because it is carried with an action.¶

{
  "@type": "EP-AUTHORITY-PROOF-v1",
  "authority_id": "auth_cfo",
  "subject": "ep:approver:ada",
  "organization_id": "org1",
  "role": "cfo",
  "scope": ["payment.release"],
  "limits": { "max_amount_usd": 50000, "currency": "USD" },
  "validity": {
    "from": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
    "to": "2027-01-01T00:00:00Z"
  },
  "revocation": {
    "status": "not_revoked",
    "checked_at": "2026-07-14T16:00:00Z"
  },
  "registry_head": "sha256:<snapshot digest>",
  "registry_epoch": 17,
  "policy_hash": "sha256:<applicable policy digest>",
  "issued_at": "2026-07-14T16:00:00Z",
  "signature": {
    "algorithm": "Ed25519",
    "key_id": "ep:authority-registry-key:sha256:<prefix>",
    "public_key": "<b64url SPKI>",
    "proof_digest": "sha256:<signed-body digest>",
    "signature_b64u": "<signature>"
  }
}

The signed body is the proof without the signature member, domain-separated with the ASCII string "EP-AUTHORITY-PROOF-v1" followed by a zero octet, and canonicalized using JCS [RFC8785]. The public key carried in the signature envelope is a verification input only. It MUST NOT establish its own authority. A relying party MUST resolve it through an accepted Authority Document or match it to an independently pinned authority issuer key.¶

The max_amount_usd field is the implemented v1 monetary limit. It permits no currency conversion: a proof denominated in USD MUST NOT satisfy a limit check for another currency. Profiles that need other monetary representations MUST define their canonical amount and comparison rules rather than relying on floating-point currency conversion.¶

4. Authority Evaluation

Given an action, its authorization evidence, an Authority Proof, and relying-party trust inputs, a verifier MUST perform all of the following checks. A missing or failed required check produces a refusal; no unknown value is treated as permission.¶

1. Verify the proof digest and signature and establish that the signing key is accepted for authority-proof issuance.¶
2. Match subject and organization to the approving identity and action context. A proof for one subject or organization MUST NOT be substituted for another.¶
3. Require the action type to be within scope and any required role to match.¶
4. Apply every material limit. If a capped action omits the amount or currency needed for comparison, refuse it.¶
5. Check that the action authorization time falls within the authority validity window and that the policy hash, when present, matches the policy being evaluated.¶
6. Check the registry head and minimum epoch required by the relying party. A stale or unavailable required authority view is not equivalent to an unbounded grant.¶
7. Apply revocation at its effective time. Terminal revocation evidence does not age out. A not_revoked snapshot establishes only the status observed at checked_at; current status is a separate, freshness-bounded input [I-D.schrock-ep-revocation-statement].¶

Portable profiles SHOULD express ceremony strength as verifier-visible proof predicates, such as user verification, named-human binding, or device binding. This document does not define a universal letter-grade assurance taxonomy.¶

5. Separation of Duties and Quorum

Authority and independence are different properties. An authority source can establish that a subject is eligible to approve an action; it cannot establish that the subject did not initiate that same action merely by asserting a flag. Initiator exclusion MUST be evaluated by joining the signed initiator and approver identities for the action. For a quorum, every counted approver MUST have its own accepted authority proof, and the authorization profile MUST separately enforce distinct-human and initiator-exclusion requirements.¶

6. Rotation, Continuity, and Time-of-Issuance

Documents chain: seq increments by one, prev_doc_digest names the previous core digest, and each rotation MUST carry a continuity signature by the previous document's root key or one of its non-revoked issuer keys. A verifier walking the chain therefore needs exactly one leap - the first document it ever saw - and every subsequent rotation is mechanically checkable. A rotation without valid continuity MUST be flagged, never silently accepted; whether endorsements can substitute for continuity is the relying party's policy (Section 9), not a default.¶

Two invariants govern key resolution, and implementations that miss either will hurt someone:¶

1. Time of issuance. An artifact verifies against the key that was valid WHEN THE ARTIFACT WAS ISSUED. Rotation never invalidates previously issued evidence, and a revocation voids a key only for signatures claimed at or after revoked_at - honest history survives compromise.¶
2. Newest document authoritative. The newest document that mentions a key identifier is authoritative for it. A revocation recorded in document N MUST NOT be undone by resolving the same key identifier against the pre-revocation entry in document N-1.¶

7. Anti-Equivocation

A malicious authority might show different documents to different relying parties. The hash chain exposes a fork when a verifier possesses both branches or a previously pinned head. Registration to a transparency service [RFC9943] can make revisions discoverable, but inclusion in one log view alone does not prove global consistency. Split-view resistance requires an independently checked consistency mechanism such as witnesses, gossip, or cross-logging. A profile MUST state which of those observations it requires; this document does not convert log inclusion into automatic acceptance.¶

8. Introduction as Evidence: Graded, Replayable Acceptance

Acceptance is not a boolean in a config file; it is a verdict over introduction evidence, evaluated under a RELYING-PARTY policy, using the same closed-verdict classification and replay-digest discipline as the evidence-sufficiency layer this family defines for actions ([I-D.schrock-ep-action-evidence-graph]). The evidence facts: the authority chain itself (consistent, signed, no unexplained continuity breaks); domain binding (the relying party's own attested observation that it fetched this document digest from the organization's origin); transparency-log inclusion and FIRST-LOGGED AGE (history can be a policy input, particularly when the history is independently witnessed); and endorsements, graded by whether the endorser is among the relying party's own pinned anchors.¶

Policies are per action class. A relying party can require stronger introduction evidence for money movement than for a low-impact action. New observations, such as an endorsement from an already pinned anchor or a longer witnessed history, may satisfy an unchanged policy, but they never alter that policy and never compel acceptance. The replay result MUST identify the policy and observations used so another evaluator can reproduce the decision.¶

9. Compromise Recovery

If an authority loses its keys entirely, continuity breaks by construction. The recovery path is explicit rather than exceptional: the successor document is published with no (or invalid) continuity signature, the break is flagged by every verifier, and the relying party's policy decides what substitutes - typically an endorsement threshold (a quorum of the relying party's pinned anchors countersigning the successor document) plus a revocation statement over the compromised keys. A relying party with no such policy simply continues to refuse: fail closed is the default, recovery is opt-in.¶

10. Security Considerations

Nothing creates trust from nothing, and this document does not claim to. It makes the bootstrap and scoped-authority inputs explicit and permits their checks to be replayed. The residual assumptions are named: domain binding inherits the Web PKI and is worth exactly that; log-backed consistency is as strong as the log's operator or the cross-log witnessing above it; endorsements are as strong as the endorser and mean nothing until a relying party pins one. A presenter-supplied key cannot establish its own authority. Key-resurrection (resolving a revoked key through an older document) is defeated by the newest-document-authoritative rule. Hash chaining detects conflicting branches only when the verifier has a comparison point; a single log view is insufficient to prove non-equivocation. Rotation-based history rewriting is constrained by time-of-issuance resolution. No combination of missing observations grades toward acceptance.¶

11. IANA Considerations

This document has no IANA actions. A well-known URI registration (ep-authority.json) is anticipated for a future revision.¶

Appendix A. Implementation Status

Two Apache-2.0 reference components are published in the EMILIA Protocol repository. lib/authority/authority-doc.js covers document creation, rotation, chain verification, time-of-issuance key resolution, endorsement verification, and introduction-policy replay. lib/authority/proof.js and lib/authority/resolver.js cover signed scoped-authority proofs and closed authority verdicts. The authority vector suite contains 27 cases, including unpinned-key, issuer-substitution, amount, currency, scope, role, lifecycle, policy, delegation, malformed-time, registry-head, and stale-epoch refusals. This revision does not claim an integrated conformance result for resolving an Authority Proof key through an Authority Document. That join and its cross-language vectors remain future conformance work; the two component-level implementation results MUST NOT be represented as an integrated result.¶

Author's Address