AgentEnvelope: Derived Authority and Legitimacy for Autonomous Systems
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: AgentEnvelope v1 defines a deterministic authority protocol for autonomous systems, AI agents, bots, workflow steps, microservices, and distributed devices. Authority is derived from customer‑held custody material, not issued by hosted services. Verifiers can check action signatures against public records without receiving vault roots or private keys. The specification formalizes canonical JSON, HKDF‑SHA256 derivation, secp256k1 signing, and keccak‑256 hashing to enable stateless verification and mint‑delegated capabilities under Apache 2.0.
Author: McPhillips, Matthew
Language: English
Topic: Access Control and Trust
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7203645280
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