🤖 AI Summary
Existing identity and access control models struggle to meet the requirements of autonomous agents operating across organizational boundaries for authorization that is explicit, constrained, auditable, revocable, and semantically consistent. This work proposes a portable authorization model tailored for autonomous agents, which decouples credential containers, authorization semantics, and enforcement engines. By integrating typed constraint algebras with a fail-closed evaluation mechanism, the model ensures unified authorization semantics across trust boundaries. It supports multi-protocol interoperability and incorporates delegation decay, governance-aware semantic resolution, and pre-flight discovery mechanisms. The design leverages established technologies such as JWT/JWS, verifiable credentials, and OAuth-rich authorization requests. Empirical validation in enterprise scenarios—including insurance claims processing and supply chain integrity—demonstrates the model’s consistency, security, and controllability in cross-system authorization.
📝 Abstract
Enterprise AI is shifting from copilots to autonomous agents capable of executing workflows, negotiating outcomes, and making decisions with limited human oversight. As these systems extend across organizational boundaries, identity alone is insufficient: an agent's authority must also be explicit, constrained, auditable, revocable, and consistently interpretable by independent receivers. This paper analyzes representative enterprise use cases in insurance claims processing and supply chain integrity to surface structural gaps in existing identity and access models. It proposes a portable authorization model for autonomous agents based on issuer-authored authorization payloads, typed constraint algebra, decision-consistent evaluation semantics, delegation attenuation, governed semantic resolution, fail-closed processing, and pre-flight discovery. The model separates credential containers, authorization payload semantics, and enforcement engines, allowing profiles such as JWT/JWS, Verifiable Credentials, OAuth Rich Authorization Requests, or policy-engine bindings to preserve a common authorization meaning across trust boundaries.