Network Working Group K. McGuinness Internet-Draft Independent Intended status: Informational 1 October 2026 Expires: 4 April 2027 An Architecture for Mission-Bound Authorization draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture-latest Abstract A Mission is a durable, approval-backed governance object for authorization: the approved task, with a lifecycle, that authority is derived for, bound to, and gated on. It is not a new way to express authority. Read as one system, the Mission model defines a delegated-authority layer: authentication says who is acting, and entitlement governance says what a principal may hold; this layer governs the approved task itself. It exists because the authority an Approver consents to is a capability envelope, not a task script, and the gap between that envelope and what a run actually does is where agent risk lives; the family's mechanisms exist to narrow that gap. This document is the structural view: the object and its invariants, a Mission's life end to end, the roles and substrate, the verb spine the profiles form, the deployment patterns, the assurance levels a deployment claims, and the requirements the family answers. It is Informational: it defines no protocol, object, or requirement, and every mechanism it names is defined by the profile it points to. About This Document This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://mcguinness.github.io/mission-bound-authorization/draft- mcguinness-mission-architecture.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft- mcguinness-mission-architecture/. Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/mcguinness/mission-bound-authorization. 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 4 April 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 1.1. Map of This Document 2. Conventions and Terminology 3. A Mission's Life 4. The Mission 4.1. The Capability Envelope 4.2. Survivable Incorrectness 5. Non-Goals 6. Mission Roles and Components 6.1. The Actor Chain 6.2. Agent Identity, Agent Deployment, and Mission 7. The Mission Verbs 7.1. Propose 7.2. Approve and Record 7.3. Govern 7.4. Enforce Each Action 7.5. Run and Wind Down 7.6. Delegate 7.7. Swarm Execution: Multiplication, Not Delegation 7.8. Project 7.9. Continue 7.10. Prove 7.11. Analyze 8. Mission Invariants 9. Meaning and Derivation 9.1. The Ontology Contract 9.2. The Authority Derivation Boundary 9.3. Approval Fidelity 10. The Mission Substrate 10.1. The Primitives, at a Glance 10.2. Token Classes 10.3. The Mission-Bound Credential 10.4. The Validity Model 10.5. Binding Security Architectures 11. Mission Assurance Levels 11.1. The Reference Architecture 11.2. Assurance Claims 11.3. Mission Binding Properties 11.4. The Containment Matrix 11.5. Composed Kill-Switch Reality 11.6. Prevention, Detection, and Residue 12. Mission Deployment Patterns 12.1. Entry Ramps by Estate 12.2. The Issuance-Only Deployment 12.3. The Short Mission 12.4. The Quarantine Pattern 12.5. The Standing-Agent Pattern 12.6. The Mission Deployment Profile 13. Security Considerations 14. Privacy Considerations 15. IANA Considerations 16. Informative References Appendix A. Mission Requirements A.1. Context and Intent A.2. Consent and Approval A.3. Lifecycle A.4. Delegated, Projected, and Enforced Execution Appendix B. Comparison to a Conventional Stack Appendix C. A Worked Composition Appendix D. Error Surfaces Appendix E. Illustrative Verification Guidance Appendix F. Deployment Profile Example Shapes Appendix G. Mission Document Map Appendix H. Document History Acknowledgments Author's Address 1. Introduction A Mission is a durable governance object created by an explicit approval event: the approved task, with a lifecycle. In the authority-bearing bindings, authority for the task is derived for the Mission, bound to it, and gated on its state. In AAuth ([I-D.draft-hardt-oauth-aauth-protocol]), the Mission Context instead governs resource decisions at the Person Server (PS) without becoming their authority language. The Mission is not a new way to express authority: Rich Authorization Requests [RFC9396] and kindred mechanisms express authority, and the Mission is the approved task that authority serves. The object fills a gap current practice pays for daily: an estate that cannot size authority to a task compensates with read-only scoping, a human executing every write, or permanently fenced pilots, and the Mission is the representation those controls substitute for. The model is deliberately decomposed: the OAuth binding (the "issuance profile" to its OAuth companions, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) defines the object and its OAuth 2.0 [RFC6749] realization, a standalone binding hosts the same object without changing an existing Authorization Server ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]), an AAuth binding maps the shared approval, reference, lifecycle-gate, and log capabilities onto that protocol's native Mission Context without importing the OAuth Authority Set ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]), and optional companions layer approval, lifecycle, enforcement, runtime, delegation, and proof capabilities on top. The decomposition keeps each interface small but spreads the structure across many documents and several bindings; this document is the single structural view. The bindings are peers: each attaches to its own protocol as an equally adoptable unit and declares what it supplies, in a Mission Substrate Statement or, for the OAuth binding, an informative Mapping Assessment. What peer standing implies, and how the bindings differ, is stated once with the binding architectures (Section 10.5). This document is Informational. It defines no protocol, mechanism, requirement, conformance class, or wire format. It does define descriptive vocabulary that other documents cite: the assurance levels and claims (Section 11) and the binding properties (Section 11.3), whose credential-mission-bound equivalence is what earns the Mission-bound token class (Section 10.2). Material marked illustrative (the worked composition, the Deployment Profile shapes, and the verification scenarios) shows one way to apply the model and fixes nothing. Every other passage summarizes rules owned by the documents it cites; where a summary and its owning profile appear to differ, the profile governs. Its boundary with the Mission Security Model ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]) is deliberate: this document describes components, interfaces, and data flows; the security model describes the trusted base and how each component's compromise degrades the guarantees. Each profile's own Security Considerations remain normative over both. 1.1. Map of This Document The body reads in four parts. The model comes first: a Mission's life end to end (Section 3), the Mission and its capability envelope (Section 4), what the family does not do (Section 5), the roles (Section 6), the verb spine that organizes every mechanism (Section 7), the invariants (Section 8), and who owns meaning and who commits authority (Section 9). The substrate and the bindings follow: the binding-neutral kernel, the validity model, and how the bindings differ (Section 10). Assurance covers what a deployment adopts, what it can prove, how its paths are bound, and what a kill reaches (Section 11). Deployment covers entry ramps, patterns, and the Deployment Profile (Section 12). The appendices hold the requirements the family answers (Appendix A), a comparison with a conventional stack (Appendix B), a worked composition (Appendix C), the error surfaces (Appendix D), illustrative verification guidance (Appendix E), the Deployment Profile shapes (Appendix F), and the document map (Appendix G); DRAFTS.md in the repository is the full catalog. 2. Conventions and Terminology Where this document uses words like "must" or "should," they carry their ordinary English meaning and describe what a referenced profile establishes, not a requirement this document places. Binding-neutral Mission terms (the Mission Reference and Controller, the approved context, the approval event, the governance gate, bounded reliance, and the named substrate capabilities) are the substrate contract's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]). Terms of the OAuth realization (Mission Intent, Authority Set, integrity anchors, and Mission Issuer) are the OAuth binding's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); a passage that uses them describes that realization or a binding that adopts it. No binding is the default reading of a passage that does not name one. Policy Enforcement Point (PEP), Policy Decision Point (PDP), consequential action, the high-consequence classes, and the Enforcement Scope Statement are the runtime profile's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); Effective Authority Set is the status profile's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]); the transition classification, including decide_anew, is the substrate contract's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]); Mission Authority Server (MAS) is defined by [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]; the AAuth binding is defined by [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]. 3. A Mission's Life The structure is easiest to see by following one Mission end to end under the OAuth binding: an operator gives an agent the task "reconcile Q3 invoices." 1. *Propose.* The client shapes the request into a structured Mission Intent, untrusted by construction, and submits it in a Pushed Authorization Request [RFC9126], optionally proposing concrete authority on the standard authorization_details parameter alongside it ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-shaping]; the OAuth binding). 2. *Approve and record.* The Authorization Server derives an Authority Set (read invoices, post adjustments under a cap), discloses it, and the Approver approves. The approval event commits intent_hash, authority_hash, and, where a proposal was submitted, proposal_hash, and creates the Mission, active with an expiry; Consent Evidence commits what was shown ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]). 3. *Issue.* Tokens are derived under the subset rule, carry the mission claim, and derivation and refresh are refused once the Mission leaves active (the OAuth binding). 4. *Enforce.* Before each consequential action (posting an adjustment), the PEP obtains a PDP permit bound to the action's concrete parameters and to current Mission state ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]). 5. *Delegate.* A sub-agent that verifies ledger entries receives a child Mission with strictly narrower authority and lineage ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). 6. *Govern.* Consumers observe state through Status and Signals; growth requires an approved successor ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]), and entries retire as their work completes ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]). 7. *Stop.* Revocation or expiry turns every gate: issuance refuses at once, the PDP denies within its state source's staleness bound, the harness pauses bound sessions and queues, and the orchestrator unwinds in-flight work ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-orchestration]); a token no state- aware gate reaches runs to its own expiry (Section 10.4). 8. *Prove.* The record, anchors, evidence, and receipts let an auditor reconstruct what was approved, shown, decided, and done, and a Mandate carries the committed facts to parties outside the deployment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). The approval-to-permit path in sequence: Approver Agent AS PEP/PDP RS | | | | | | | 1 Mission | | | | | Intent (PAR) | | | | |---------------->| | | | 2 disclose and approve | | | |<--------------------------->| | | | | Mission active:| | | | | intent_hash, | | | | | authority_hash | | | | | 3 Mission-bound | | | | | token | | | | |<----------------| | | | | 4 action, token, parameters | | | |------------------------------>| | | | | 5 state and | | | | | authority | | | | |<----------->| | | | | | 6 permit, | | | | | evidence | | | 7 permitted action executes |----------->| Under the standalone binding the same life runs with ordinary tokens and the Mission Join in place of step 3's claim carriage; there, revocation stops nothing at the token layer, and runtime enforcement is the only cutoff (Section 10.5). In sequence, the standalone mode runs submit, approve, poll, join, permit: Client MAS Approver PEP/PDP | | | | | 1 submit Intent | | | |------------------->| | | | 2 202 pending | | | |<-------------------| | | | | 3 disclose | | | |----------------->| | | | 4 approve | | | |<-----------------| | | | Mission active | | | 5 poll | | | |------------------->| | | | 6 approved, | | | | mission_id | | | |<-------------------| | | | 7 action, token, | | | | Mission ref | | | |--------------------------------------------------->| | | 8 signed status: | | | | active | | | |<------------------------------| | |------------------------------>| | | | 9 join; | | | | evaluate | | 10 permit | | | |<---------------------------------------------------| The token in step 7 is an ordinary OAuth token from the unchanged AS; steps 8 through 10 are the Mission Join and the runtime decision (the MAS's Mission Join section), and the MAS's staged walkthrough of the same flow is its end-to-end appendix ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). Under the AAuth binding, the Person Server instead governs the native Mission Context through propose, clarify, approve, and the mission log; it does not emulate the AS's Authority Set, integrity anchors, PDP permits, Child Missions, or portable evidence (Section 10.5, Section 11). 4. The Mission OAuth 2.0 standardizes authorization: an access token represents authorization granted to the client, for a delegating user or for the client's own behalf, and can serve many requests, and a deployment may retain durable grant or consent state behind it. What OAuth does not standardize is an independently addressable, lifecycle-bearing approved-task object: an artifact whose semantics persist across tokens, actors, audiences, and evidence. That matters for AI agents: given a mission (book the trip, reconcile the ledger), an agent takes many actions across many resources over a long time, spawning sub-agents and surviving restarts, and independently issued tokens cannot express the approved task, its boundary, or its end (the OAuth binding's Introduction). The family separates the task from the authority, and the authorization flow separates four objects: the Intent (proposed work, inert until approved), the Mission (the approved, governed work), the Authority derived for it, and each Action that uses it, with lifecycle cutting through the last three. The Mission is the approved task, with a lifecycle. In the OAuth model, the Authority Set is the concrete authority (resources, actions, constraints) derived for it. In every binding, an explicit approval event creates the Mission and commits its approved context, or a verifiable commitment to it, and the Mission's Controller then owns its state. In the OAuth binding, a client proposes a Mission Intent, and may propose concrete authority alongside it; the Mission Issuer derives an Authority Set; and the approval event commits both. In the OAuth binding, the commitment is the integrity anchors: intent_hash over the approved Mission Intent, authority_hash over the consented Authority Set, and, where the client submitted an authority proposal, proposal_hash over the submitted authorization_details array, each computed over a domain-separated, issuer-bound envelope with fixed canonicalization, so an auditor can reproduce each digest from the record alone (the OAuth binding's Mission Approval, Integrity Anchors, and Canonicalization Rules sections). The record is immutable except for its state (the Mission Record section). In the OAuth binding the lifecycle states are active, revoked, and expired, and only active permits issuance or a new positive governance decision. A non-active state stops new derivation at once; authority already issued ends at the earliest of delivered revocation, a runtime or state-aware re-check, or the credential's own expiry (Section 10.4). Companions add states (suspended, completed, superseded, cascaded), and one rule keeps that safe without a registry: a consumer treats every state other than the exact value active, including one it does not recognize, as non-active, so an unrecognized state fails safe (the OAuth binding's Mission Lifecycle and Gating section). AAuth realizes the separation differently. Its exact-byte s256 commits the private approved mission blob, and {approver, s256} is the stable reference. The PS applies contextual governance using that blob and the ordered mission log; scopes, resource tokens, Resource and Access Server policy, and optionally AAuth Rich Resource Requests (R3, [I-D.draft-hardt-aauth-r3]) carry deterministic resource authorization. AAuth does not add the OAuth Authority Set or its two anchors, and its native lifecycle remains exactly active or terminated. The Mission model is the beginning of a distinct layer. Authentication and token issuance answer who is acting and what a single credential carries; governance of standing entitlements answers what a principal should hold over time. Neither governs the approved task a delegate performs on a principal's behalf: its bounded authority, its lifecycle, the per-action check, and the evidence that binds back to it. That is the delegated-authority layer this family defines, composing with the layers below rather than replacing them, and the Mission Authority Server ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]) is its binding-independent control plane across an estate, whichever party issues a given token. The control-plane vocabulary is exact, not loose: * the issuer side holds desired state (the record, its authority, its lifecycle and state version), reconciles it (gating, the ceiling review, evidence reconciliation), and distributes bounded authority (policy views, status, the management surface); * tokens and the PEP/PDP boundary are the layer's data plane; and * Status and Signals are the channel between the two. The plane the layer governs is authority, never operations: how an agent runs stays with the harness and the orchestrator. Grouped as planes rather than parts, the roles of Section 6 form this layer, with the evidence surface crossing all of them: control Mission control point (OAuth AS | MAS | AAuth PS | UMA AS | GNAP AS): approved context, lifecycle and gating; anchors and authority distribution where defined | ^ | state, authority | evidence v | enforcement PEP and PDP: a permit per consequential action, parameter binding, custody | ^ | mediated actions | outcomes v | execution harness, agent, orchestrator: sessions, sub-agents, queues, unwinding evidence Consent Evidence, decision and execution (crossing) evidence, Mission Receipts, the Mandate, audit transparency 4.1. The Capability Envelope One tension organizes the whole family. A Mission commits its authority and intent once, at approval, but an agent's work is open- ended: the actions a task will take are not known when it is approved. "Reconcile Q3 invoices" must authorize reading any invoice and posting any adjustment under the cap, because the specific ones cannot be enumerated in advance. So the Authority Set an Approver consents to is a *capability envelope, not a task specification*, and the gap between that envelope and what a given run actually does is where agent risk lives. The family's mechanisms are levers that narrow that gap: * constraint-bounding and the subset rule shrink the envelope at issuance; * runtime enforcement checks each action against it at the point of use; * action-bound approval re-consents the highest-consequence actions with their concrete parameters; * progressive authorization trades many increment approvals for one bounded ceiling; * metering caps cumulative consumption; and * completion retires authority as the task finishes. No single lever closes the gap; a deployment composes the ones its risk warrants (Section 11), and the verbs of Section 7 organize the levers by the question each answers. What approval commits is broader than the structured Authority Set alone: it also commits the rendered intent context (goal, task_bounds, and, where it differs, the requested ceiling), the effective expires_at, and the rendered derivation_limit and any metering bound ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-derivation-limits], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]). Concrete request values, current consumption, and action sequencing are decision-time facts, evaluated later by runtime policy, metering, or action-bound (transaction) approval; core does not require them to be re-rendered to the original Approver, though action-bound approval may re-render exactly that. The lifecycle control gates new derivation from the envelope; a credential already materialized under it keeps running to its own bound unless an action-time gate reaches it first (Section 11.5). The two halves compose but do not substitute: an envelope real at approval time can still admit, at decision time, an effect the Approver never saw rendered in that form. Attribution shares the grain limit: proving which concurrent task item produced a permitted action needs a verified cross-link that no family carrier supplies (Section 11.3). 4.2. Survivable Incorrectness The levers share one strategy: they convert semantic risk into structural signals. A policy decision point is never asked to judge whether content is harmful; provenance (the harness taint context), composition (the quarantine pattern), egress enumeration and volume bounds, separation of duty, and re-consent turn that question into facts a decision can gate on. A content evaluator a deployment adds composes as Resource policy at the decision point and only ever narrows. The stance beneath the levers is *survivable incorrectness*: the agent is probabilistic, so the family never bets on the model being right and builds so that wrong is survivable, on two arms. The action arm is this envelope and its levers, wire-backed, with in- flight work unwinding through recorded reversibility classes ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-orchestration]). The input arm is *least exposure*: everything the agent sees can steer it and everything it holds can leak, so a Mission budgets disclosure as well as authority, and mediated custody generalizes from credentials to context. The arms differ in maturity, and the difference is stated rather than blurred: the exposure arm's enforceable edges are the harness taint rule, egress mediation, and catalog filtering ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]), while its interior, retrieval, memory, and context assembly scoped to the Mission, has no interoperable form yet and is deployment discipline, declared in the Deployment Profile (Section 12.6) rather than claimed. 5. Non-Goals The model's boundary is deliberate. The family does not define: * *A new grant protocol.* Rich Authorization Requests [RFC9396] and kindred mechanisms already fill the authority-expression role; the family leaves the grant exchange to them and defines its own cross-resource authorization_details type only where [RFC9396] leaves type semantics to the type, in the OAuth binding's Mission Resource Access Profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]). The same restraint holds against GNAP and the capability-system lineage (macaroons, Biscuit, UCAN, object-capability narrowing): this family composes with deployed grant protocols and attenuation primitives rather than introducing a competing one of its own; the OAuth binding states the comparison ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). * *A policy language.* The PDP evaluates the Mission's Authority Set, constraints, and state; how a deployment authors policy beyond them is local ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). * *Entitlement governance.* What standing access a principal should hold over time belongs to existing governance layers; the delegated-authority layer composes with them (Section 4). * *Agent identity and deployment governance.* Who the agent is, its concrete instance, and its approved behavioral version belong to the deployment's agent IAM and change governance; the family authenticates against and consumes those facts without defining them (Section 6.2). * *An agent framework.* The harness constrains the execution environment's relationship to Mission state; it does not say how an agent plans, reasons, or calls tools ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]). * *Semantic derivation.* Whether a derived Authority Set is the right reading of the task is committed and auditable, not standardized (Section 9.2). * *Agent trustworthiness.* The family bounds what a compromised or injected agent can do; it does not make the agent trustworthy ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). 6. Mission Roles and Components For each component: what it does, what it holds, and which document specifies it. What its compromise costs is the security model's subject ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). Agent (client): Proposes the Mission Intent and executes the task; in the OAuth binding it holds derived Mission-bound tokens; outside the trusted base and assumed compromisable ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). A deployment may authenticate concrete agent instances with client instance identification for attestation-based client authentication, endorsing its attesters in client metadata ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-attesters]), which sharpens joins and evidence attribution to instance granularity without touching the Mission model; instance evidence alone identifies no actor or delegate ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id], Section 5). Attestation-based client authentication ([I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-attestation-based-client-auth]) is the substrate that profile extends, and SPIFFE ([I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-spiffe-client-auth]) supplies workload credentials that on their own convey no instance identity under it ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id], Section 8.2); none of them defines the Mission actor, delegation, intent, lifecycle, or evidence semantics defined here. Subject: The user or system on whose behalf the Mission is approved, an (iss, sub) pair recorded immutably at approval (the OAuth binding). AAuth keeps the person's relationship and context at the PS and does not add this OAuth Subject tuple to the mission blob. Approver: The single accountable principal who approves the Mission; equal to the Subject for self-approval (the OAuth binding's Single Accountable Approver section). In AAuth, the wire approver value names the PS, not a portable person identifier; the person reviews and approves through that PS. Mission Issuer: Validates the Mission Intent, runs the approval event, records the Mission, and owns its state. The authority- bearing bindings host it: * OAuth Authorization Server: every derived token carries the mission claim, and issuance and refresh are gated on Mission state ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). * Mission Authority Server: the same record, anchors, and lifecycle without issuing tokens; the PDP joins ordinary credentials to the Mission at the point of use ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). * UMA 2.0 Authorization Server (experimental sketch): the pushed Mission Intent rides UMA claims pushing, the resource owner's decision fills UMA's authorization assessment, and RPT issuance is gated on state ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-uma]). * GNAP authorization server (experimental sketch): the Mission Intent rides the grant request as a registered member, the interaction or a standing basis is the approval event, and access token issuance and rotation are gated on state ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-gnap]). The OAuth and standalone authority-bearing bindings also serve audience-scoped policy views, the authority-distribution artifact the runtime and MAS profiles define ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). The AAuth binding does not define such a view from the mission blob; deterministic resource authorization remains in scopes, resource tokens, Resource and Access Server policy, and optionally R3. AAuth Person Server: The controlling authority for the native Mission Context rather than an OAuth-style Mission Issuer. The mission blob is committed by AAuth's s256, and the PS gates PS- asserted issuance and federated brokering. It does not gate direct identity-based or resource-managed decisions ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). Resource Server: The protected resource. In the OAuth binding it enforces statelessly from the token and can check the mission claim (the OAuth binding's Resource Server Enforcement section); in the standalone binding the token carries no Mission signal, and Mission properties reach it only through the enforcement path. PEP and PDP: The PEP sits at the last controllable boundary before an action and obtains a permit for each consequential action; under mediated custody it, not the agent, holds the sender- constraint key. The PDP evaluates the action against the Mission's authority, constraints, actor chain, and current state, and fails closed ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]); in the standalone binding it also verifies the subject and client join (the MAS's Mission Join section). Agent harness: Hosts the agent; binds sessions, task graphs, queues, cached tool connections, and sub-agent handles to Mission state; establishes the environment with no unmediated path to mediated actions ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]). Orchestrator: Assigns each workflow step a reversibility class, records an unwind plan before dispatch, and compensates in-flight work when a Mission stops ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-orchestration]). Transparency Service: An append-only SCITT log [RFC9943] that registers Mission evidence as Signed Statements and issues receipts verifiable offline ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). Verifiers: Parties outside the deployment that check Mission facts without a token exchange: Mandate verifiers confirm what was approved ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]); evidence consumers check consent, decision, and execution evidence against the anchors and receipts ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]). The bindings converge on shared Mission Context capabilities, while authority carriage and enforcement remain binding-dependent: Subject Approver \ | \ approval event \ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Mission Control Point | | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | | | OAuth AS: | Standalone| AAuth PS: | UMA 2.0 AS| GNAP AS | | | | Mission- | MAS: no | Mission | (sketch): | (sketch): | | | | bound | tokens; | Context; | pushed | Intent in | | | | tokens | the PDP | PS paths | Intent; | request; | | | | gated on | joins to | gated | RPTs gated| tokens | | | | state | Mission | | on state | gated | | | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | +-------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-------+ v v v v v durable approved context and lifecycle; Authority Set and anchors where the binding defines them | | binding-specific state, context, | and authority surfaces v Agent ------> PEP ----------> PDP (harness, | <- permit - orchestrator) v Resource Server 6.1. The Actor Chain One material action splits across these roles, and the family keeps each distinct and attributable rather than collapsing them into one "agent" identity. The identifiers below are shown in the OAuth binding's instantiation; each binding carries the same distinctions in its own vocabulary, AAuth natively with its agent identifier, the Person at the PS, parent_agent for a parent-mediated sub-agent, and the call chain for a service hop ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]): Principal: the Subject, the token sub (the OAuth binding). Accountable approver: the Approver, committed at the approval event (the OAuth binding). Intent generator: the shaper, with Shaping Evidence recording what it emitted ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-shaping]). Authorizer: the Mission Issuer at issuance (the OAuth binding); the PDP per action ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). Approved agent: the OAuth client, client_id on every derived token (the OAuth binding). Executing delegate: the outermost act actor (the OAuth binding's Delegation section). Credential holder: the mediating PEP under mediated custody ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). Capability executor: the executor of the capability source binding ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding]). Downstream identity: the audience-scoped token and the cross-domain local subject ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]). Attribution survives because no role is inferred from another: each is carried by its own construct, and the evidence layer records them together, in runtime evidence and the Mission Receipt ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]), Consent Evidence, and the audit feed. The chain is actor lineage, not authority lineage. An act chain records who acted through whom; it does not carry what task was approved, how authority narrowed at each derivation, whether the task remains active, or which parameter constraints bind. Those travel in the Mission's own constructs: the anchors, the Authority Set, the lifecycle state, and Child Mission lineage ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). Reading an actor chain as authorization provenance is the gap the Mission's lineage exists to close. 6.2. Agent Identity, Agent Deployment, and Mission Separately from the authorization flow's four objects (Section 4), a deployment that runs agents under both an agent identity system and this family governs three independently lifecycle-bearing objects. Each has its own owner, lifecycle, and revocation, and the model stays clean only while none absorbs another's job: Agent identity (who is acting): The logical agent and, where client instance identification is deployed, the concrete instance (Section 6). Owned by the deployment's agent IAM, a registry or directory outside this family, and consumed as the client_id, the client-instance attestation, and validated Instance Context. Agent Deployment (what is running): The approved behavioral version of the agent: its code, model, system prompt, tool allowlist, data scope, and runtime configuration. Owned by the deployment's change governance; a change to any of these is a new Agent Deployment, and which changes require re-approving standing Missions is policy that governance records. A Mission may be pinned to a named Agent Deployment where a companion Agent Deployment Binding profile realizes that pin ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] names the profile and its required properties but defines none of its wire mechanics itself). This object is distinct from the Mission Deployment Profile (Section 12.6), which is the estate's published claims manifest, not a property of an agent. Mission (why the authority exists): This family's object: the approved task, its lifecycle, and, where the binding derives one, its Authority Set. An agent registry is a complementary dependency, not part of the Mission system; an A2A AgentCard directory ([A2A]) is one example source. Discovery contents are not authority for workload identity, authorization, or effective capabilities: a deployment applies local admission policy and independently verifies the relevant credential, resource metadata, and capability evidence. Where one exists, the Mission Issuer and the PDP consume a small, stable slice of it: * the agent identifier and its owner, * current status and revocation state, * the approved Agent Deployment, * eligibility bounds (what the registry permits the agent to be approved for, a derivation input, never a grant), and * risk tier. Registry state is a state source like any other: the consuming decision point treats it under the runtime profile's freshness discipline, with a declared staleness bound, failing closed when it cannot be established ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). Authorization composes conjunctively across these lifecycles and the credential's own: a decision may depend on agent state, Mission state, and credential validity, and each gates independently. A valid credential never overrides a revoked agent or a non-active Mission, and a live agent under an active Mission still fails on an expired credential. Binding strength accumulates as a deployment adds it: authority is issued to an authenticated client; sender-constraint keys pin possession; client-instance attestation over an instance-unique key pins the concrete instance; attested runtimes pin the execution environment; and an Agent Deployment pin holds the behavioral version. The key and instance steps are the presenter-key-bound and instance-bound binding properties (Section 11.3); none of these steps is an assurance level. The division of labor with agent IAM is one sentence: agent identity preserves who is acting, and the Mission preserves why their authority exists. The registry and workload identity authenticate an approved agent instance; the Mission and its derived Authority Set say what sanctioned work that instance carries; per-hop credentials narrow; the runtime layer enforces each action and parameter; and the evidence layer joins what was approved, decided, and done. 7. The Mission Verbs The family organizes along a verb spine: each verb answers one question, sits on one trust boundary, and is owned by named documents; the levers of Section 4.1 sort onto this spine by the question each answers. propose OAuth Intent Shaping or AAuth native proposal (client or agent side, untrusted) | approve Mission control point: the OAuth AS, Mission and record Authority Server, AAuth Person Server contextual-governance binding, UMA AS, or GNAP AS (+ Consent Evidence, Deferred Approval) | the Mission: durable approved context and lifecycle; authority anchors where defined | govern Status (pull), Signals (push), Expansion (widen), Completion (retire) | enforce Runtime contract -> AuthZEN profile: each action a PDP permit before every consequential action | run and Harness (continuity is not authority), wind down Orchestration (unwind in-flight work) delegate Child Delegation, Offline Attenuation project Cross-Domain Projection (a Mission honored in another trust domain) continue Mission Continuation (authorization continuity over ICA, async delegation, and cross-domain transports) prove Consent Evidence, Mandate, Audit analyze Security Model (the trusted base) The family manifest records each verb's owning documents. The Packages column gives the product architect's view of the same system: five architecture packages a deployment builds, independent of how the drafts are cut for standardization. They are Mission Control; Authority Distribution, which includes the four Mission Issuer bindings (OAuth, the MAS, UMA, and GNAP); Runtime Enforcement; Agent Execution Governance; and Evidence and Accountability. A document can serve more than one package, and the document map (Appendix G) names every draft. +========+===========================================+==============+ |Verb | Owning documents |Packages | +========+===========================================+==============+ |propose | mission-shaping, oauth-mission- |Agent | | | submission-evidence |Execution | | | |Governance | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |approve | oauth-mission, mission-authority-server, |Mission | |and | mission-aauth, mission-uma, mission- |Control; | |record | gnap, mission-substrate, oauth-mission- |Authority | | | resource-access, oauth-mission-issuance- |Distribution; | | | grant, oauth-mission-consent-evidence, |Evidence and | | | oauth-mission-approval, oauth-mission- |Accountability| | | approval-revision, oauth-mission- | | | | template, mission-approval-governance | | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |govern | oauth-mission-status, oauth-mission- |Mission | | | status-list, oauth-mission-signals, |Control; | | | oauth-mission-management, oauth-mission- |Runtime | | | discharge, oauth-mission-expansion, |Enforcement | | | oauth-mission-progressive, oauth- |(metering); | | | mission-containment, oauth-mission- |Agent | | | derivation-limits, mission-control- |Execution | | | plane, mission-discovery, mission- |Governance | | | metering, mission-aauth-management, |(discovery) | | | aauth-mission-expiry | | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |enforce | mission-runtime, mission-runtime-oauth, |Runtime | |each | mission-authzen, mission-runtime- |Enforcement; | |action | evidence, mission-capability-binding, |Evidence and | | | oauth-mission-transaction-authorization |Accountability| +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |run and | mission-harness, mission-orchestration |Agent | |wind | |Execution | |down | |Governance | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |delegate| oauth-mission-child-delegation, oauth- |Authority | | | mission-attenuation, oauth-mission- |Distribution | | | cross-org-delegation | | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |project | oauth-mission-cross-domain, oauth- |Authority | | | mission-cross-org-delegation |Distribution | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |continue| oauth-mission-continuation |Authority | | | |Distribution | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |prove | oauth-mission-consent-evidence, oauth- |Evidence and | | | mission-approved-set-verification, |Accountability| | | oauth-mission-work-products, mission- | | | | runtime-evidence, mission-mandate, | | | | mission-audit, mission-evidence-envelope | | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ |analyze | mission-security-model, mission-aam, |all five | | | this document | | +--------+-------------------------------------------+--------------+ Table 1: The verb spine: owning documents and packages 7.1. Propose The question: how does a user's request become a candidate approved task? In OAuth, the boundary is the client side and Intent Shaping produces an untrusted Mission Intent ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-shaping]), entering through Pushed Authorization Requests [RFC9126] or the MAS submission endpoint, with any Intent Submission Evidence processed under [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-submission-evidence]. In AAuth, the agent sends the native description and requested tools to the Person Server's mission endpoint. The AAuth binding defines no Mission Intent or dependency on the shaping profile. 7.2. Approve and Record The question: how does a proposed task become an approved, committed Mission? The boundary is the binding's control point; the approval event is where trust is created. Owners: the five bindings ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-uma], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-gnap]), Consent Evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]) committing the disclosure shown to the Approver, and Deferred Approval ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-approval]), the OAuth binding's asynchronous path, with an experimental companion adding an in-review narrowing negotiation; the standalone and AAuth bindings are natively asynchronous. AAuth's baseline approval commits its exact mission blob, not the family Consent Evidence object. Where the experimental progressive authorization companion is used, the initial approval also consents an authority ceiling for later staged widening ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]). Who holds the deciding side is a spectrum, not a species: the approval event requires an accountable principal deciding against committed inputs before any authority exists, and the proposer is never the approver. A deterministic, versioned policy can approve at machine speed within a ceiling a human consented to (the policy_drawdown and template authorization bases that companion profiles define on the OAuth binding's extension point, Section 8): policy approves the instance because a human approved the policy or the template, with policy_version keeping that chain re-checkable, while a model's generated judgment is never the sole authority for granting or widening: a generated approver reading attacker- influenced proposals is itself an injection surface. The high- consequence classes stay on a fresh human decision, per the progressive profile's prohibited set ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]). 7.3. Govern The question: how do consumers observe Mission state, and how does authority grow or retire mid-task? The boundary: between the issuer and every consumer relying on state. Owners: Status, the signed pull surface with a lifecycle endpoint ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]), extended by the Status List companion for fleet-scale reliance ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list]) and by the Entry Discharge companion for per-entry completion discharge ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]); Signals, the push complement ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]); Expansion, widening only via an approved successor ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]); Containment, event- triggered monotonic narrowing of a live Mission's effective authority ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]); Management, fleet enumeration and bulk lifecycle for operators ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-management]); and Discovery, experimental, binding encountered resources within a pre-consented ceiling ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-discovery]). The AAuth binding carries this verb natively: its management companion for status, termination, and delegation-tree queries ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth-management]); the approved lifetime bound is AAuth's own expires_at, profiled by the expiry document ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-aauth-mission-expiry]). 7.4. Enforce Each Action The question: is this specific action, with these parameters, permitted under this Mission now? The boundary: the last controllable point between agent and resource. Owners: the runtime profile, the decision contract with parameter binding, custody, and fail-closed behavior ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); its AuthZEN profile, the concrete decision API ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]); the runtime evidence companion, the Decision Evidence, Execution Evidence, and Refusal Record objects ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]). Its decision composes conjunctively with the structural plane above: Effective Authority Set membership, every applicable cumulative- consumption or stateful operational gate, and a required action-bound approval are each independently necessary, and none grants, widens, or restores another ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], Section "The Runtime Decision"). 7.5. Run and Wind Down The question: how does governed work start, persist, pause, and unwind when Mission state changes? The boundary: the operator's execution environment around the agent. Owners: the harness, binding session continuity to Mission state ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]); Orchestration, unwinding in-flight work through reversibility classes and recorded unwind plans ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-orchestration]). 7.6. Delegate The question: how does authority reach a sub-agent without widening? The boundary: between principals acting under one approval. Owners: Child Delegation, child Missions with lineage, strict-subset authority, and cascade revocation ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]); Offline Attenuation, narrower Mission-bound tokens minted off the issuer's hot path ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-attenuation]). Offline attenuation requires the runtime enforcement layer: its kill switch is the runtime state re-check. Both build on the actor chain of the OAuth binding's Delegation Within a Mission section. The chooser: the OAuth binding's token-exchange delegation for an execution hop living and dying with the parent's lifecycle; a Child Mission when the delegate needs its own lifecycle, approval, or audit identity; attenuation, experimental, only where offline minting is the constraint. The same principal exercising the same authority concurrently is not delegation at all but swarm execution (Section 7.7). AAuth delegates natively: a parent-mediated sub-agent under parent_agent, distinct from the call chain of a service hop, with no Authority Set machinery imported ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). 7.7. Swarm Execution: Multiplication, Not Delegation One composition of the three lifecycle-bearing objects (Section 6.2) recurs often enough to name. A Mission pinned to an Agent Deployment class or version, executed concurrently by N attested instances of that Deployment, is multiplication, not delegation: no act hop, no Child Mission, no attenuation chain, because authority never moves between principals. This pin is a named architectural pattern, not a wire member the OAuth binding currently defines: that document reserves no Intent member for it and points forward to a dedicated Agent Deployment Binding profile that a deployment wanting this pin implements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Late binding is attestation: an instance joins the work by authenticating as the pinned Deployment with its own Client Attestation ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id]), not by receiving a credential from a peer. The invariant is class-grain authorization, instance-grain attribution: the class, the Agent Deployment projected as client_id, is an authorization subject, never an attribution subject, and attribution stays per-instance through the instance substrate, which attributes a presentation to an instance only under a sender-constraint key unique to it ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id], Section 7.3). The derivation limits profile's derivation_limit ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-derivation-limits]) is not a fan-out or concurrency ceiling: it counts issuance events, not instances, and a single instance refreshing N times consumes it exactly as N instances deriving once each would. What actually bounds a swarm's aggregate consumption is the metering profile's Mission-grain budget: consumption bounds attach to the Mission, not to any one instance, so a swarm of instances shares one budget ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]). Swarm execution is the rung before the Delegate verb's chooser: more attested instances of the pinned Deployment deriving under one Mission, with no new construct. A different principal acting inline, a durable sub-agent, and offline narrowing take the chooser's rungs. 7.8. Project The question: how is one Mission honored in another trust domain? The boundary: a trust boundary the origin does not control, where the verifier holds no session with the issuer. Owner: Cross-Domain Projection, a single-hop grant that carries the Mission's identifier, issuer, and authority hash into a partner domain unchanged, where a Resource AS mints a local token bounded by the projected authority ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]). Projection preserves authority across the boundary rather than narrowing it to a sub-actor, which is why it is a distinct verb from Delegate; downstream revocation latency is the local token lifetime. 7.9. Continue The question: how does a Mission's authorization continue, under the same approval and constraints, when the acting identity must be re- established at each hop or after the original credential is gone? The boundary: the seam between authorization continuity, which the Mission owns, and identity continuity, which a transport carries. Owner: Mission Continuation ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-continuation]), the authorization-continuity profile, which keeps three easily conflated things apart. Identity continuity, who is acting and how that identity legitimately continues, rides a transport rather than this profile: Identity Continuation ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation-assertion]) for short- lived, sender-constrained hops among Resource Authorization Servers that trust a common identity provider; async delegation ([I-D.draft-zhu-oauth-async-delegation]) for a long-running, disconnected task; and the cross-domain grant ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]) across a trust boundary. Authorization continuity, what work remains authorized under which constraints on whose approval, is the Mission's: every continued grant derives a subset of the Mission's Authority Set, is state-gated at issuance, is bounded by the Mission's expiry, and ends when the Mission goes terminal. Execution-time evidence records, against the Mission, what was done at each continued hop. The load- bearing invariant is that a continuation handle grants nothing: it names an accepted hop, and every continued grant re-passes the Mission's active gate, so continuity is never authority, the rule the harness already applies to session continuity ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]). Continue is therefore distinct from Delegate, which narrows authority to a sub-actor, and it uses the Project verb's cross-domain grant as one transport rather than replacing it. 7.10. Prove The question: what can a party outside the deployment verify about what was approved and done? The boundary: across trust domains and time; the verifier holds no session with the issuer. Owners: Consent Evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]); the Mandate, a signed, portable statement that authorizes nothing ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]); the Mission Receipt, portable evidence of an action taken under a Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); Audit Transparency, the append-only evidence log ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). 7.11. Analyze The question: which components must be trusted, and what does each one's compromise cost? The boundary: the whole system. Owner: the Mission Security Model ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). 8. Mission Invariants The following seven invariants define the family's portable-authority model and are stated normatively by their home documents. They apply to the OAuth binding and to companions and bindings that explicitly adopt the corresponding Authority Set capabilities. A change that would break one in those bindings is a change to that model, not to a profile. The AAuth binding adopts the context-level invariants: durable approval, stable attribution, exact-byte integrity, an active-state gate at the PS, and termination. It does not adopt the OAuth Authority Set, the OAuth integrity anchors, or universal subset derivation. AAuth resource authority is decided afresh in the vocabulary and policy of each Resource or Access Server, with contextual PS governance when the PS is on path. Read as shared capabilities rather than universal wire semantics, all the bindings carry durability, attribution, and termination; narrowing and containment require a structured-authority capability, so they are not baseline AAuth Mission Context properties. *Authority serves an approved task*: No Mission-bound authority exists except by derivation for a Mission, and a Mission is created only when rooted in an approved authorization basis that commits intent_hash and authority_hash (the OAuth binding). Fields an agent can influence shape authority only through the pre-approval derivation the Approver consents to; once the Mission is approved they are inert and never derive, widen, or gate authority. *Only active permits*: Issuance, refresh, and every new positive governance decision require the exact state active; every other state, including an unrecognized one, fails safe (the OAuth binding's Mission Lifecycle and Gating section). A state-aware consumer relies only while it observes active; a state-unaware consumer retains the bounded materialized-credential residual (Section 10.4). In AAuth, only PS operations and the PS-asserted and federated authorization paths are structurally gated; identity-based and resource-managed decisions do not pass through the PS. On the gated paths the gate covers requests whose resource token carries the validated Mission Reference; a stripped reference yields a missionless request, bounded by the binding's downgrade rules ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). *Authority only narrows*: Derived tokens, delegated child Missions, attenuated tokens, and cross-domain projections carry subsets; widening exists only as an approved successor: a fresh approval ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]), or policy drawdown within a ceiling a human pre-consented ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]). The relation is typed: it is defined where a structured-authority vocabulary defines it (on the OAuth binding, mission_resource_access and its Common Constraints, defined by the OAuth binding's Mission Resource Access Profile), and authority carried in a type with no defined subset relation is carried as approved, neither narrowed, delegated, nor projected; moving authority into expressive policy- language entries weakens this guarantee exactly there, a trade to make knowingly ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). *Revocation is possession-independent*: A Mission ends by a state change at its issuer, not by finding and destroying credentials; outstanding credentials meet the issuance gate, the runtime re- check, or their own expiry, whichever comes first (Section 10.4; [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]). *Attribution is carried, never inferred*: Each role in the actor chain travels in its own construct, and the evidence layer records them together; no role is derived from another (Section 6.1). The credential-to-Mission association is itself a carried fact only where a binding carries the mission claim; under the standalone binding the PDP's join establishes it by inference, bounded by that binding's join assurance (Section 10.5). *Enforcement fails closed; inert surfaces fail safe*: A PDP that cannot establish state or authority within the published staleness bound denies, and a consumer that cannot refresh state treats its cache as unreliable rather than as permission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). *Anchors commit; they do not prove semantics*: The integrity anchors prove what was approved and committed, not that the derivation was the right reading of the task (Section 9.2). AAuth's corresponding integrity property is the s256 commitment over exact mission-blob bytes, not the OAuth integrity anchors. Three readings of the invariants recur. Each follows from the seven and adds no eighth: Authorization bases: "Approved" in the first invariant has more than one basis. The OAuth binding fully defines one, direct, a human's own approval, and provides the extension point, an authorization- basis type string, that companion profiles use to define others: template, a dispatch drawing on a ceiling the human consented to once, and policy_drawdown, a child instance a policy adjudicates within a bound the parent's human already consented to. Every basis fixes the same accountable human as consent_principal; the bases differ only in what activated this instance and what root that activation traces to (the OAuth binding). Work products: Authority never rides a work product. Crossing into a Mission, a work product is input the receiving Mission re- evaluates under its own Authority Set, never a source of authority itself. The Mission Work Products companion carries this through non-transitive Mission-to-Mission handoff ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-work-products]), and the OAuth binding states the rule in its "Authority Does Not Propagate With Information" section ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Composition: The invariants bound one Mission's own Authority Set, not the aggregate surface a delegation tree, a cross-domain hop, or a chain of child generations reaches together. Delegation depth resets at each cross-domain hop and child generation, and each Child Mission enforces its own derivation cap independently of its parent's, so the authorized surface a body of work can reach can exceed what any single approval appears to bound. Disclosing the composed bound at the consent surface is the cross- domain and child-delegation profiles' role, and bounding aggregate consumption is the metering profile's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]). The OAuth binding states the same property in its "Composition and the Effective Ceiling" section ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). 9. Meaning and Derivation Three questions sit between a proposed task and enforced authority: who owns what an operation means (Section 9.1), who commits the authority derived from the task (Section 9.2), and what the approval event fixes (Section 9.3). 9.1. The Ontology Contract The capability envelope (Section 4.1) meets its hardest case in the open world. The OAuth model starts with authority client-proposed and enumerated at approval; an agent that discovers resources at encounter time breaks that premise, and some authorization mechanisms invert it: the resource declares its own operations and consequences. The derivation boundary (Section 9.2, below) settles who commits authority; this section settles who owns what an operation means. The ownership statement is one sentence: the resource owns the ontology, its operations, its constraint semantics, and their consequences, while derivation, consent rendering, and enforcement consume that meaning without owning it, and no layer invents meaning it does not own. The consuming contract is equally short: meaning binds at approval, is enforced at the point of use, and any translation between the resource's vocabulary and another party's is trusted, verified, or separately approved, never a place where authority widens. One boundary is shared by agreement: the resource owns its operation semantics and consequences, while the family owns the registered cross-resource constraint vocabulary, which a resource explicitly advertises and adopts before it binds ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]). Resource-owned meaning reaches the three consuming layers through five mechanisms, each normative in its own home and composing as one contract: Common Constraints: The registered constraint vocabulary every conforming party evaluates identically, with the mission_constraints_supported protected-resource metadata member advertising which constraints a resource enforces. Home: the OAuth binding's Mission Resource Access Profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]). Capability-source binding: Catalog-sourced capability definitions (an MCP tool, an OpenAPI operation) content-digested at derivation and refused on drift at decision time, so the meaning authority bound to is the meaning enforced. Home: the capability-binding companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding]). Operation Profiles: The per-operation statement of normalization and binding rules, carrying resource-declared operation semantics such as idempotency, reversibility, and lease requirements into parameter binding. Home: the runtime profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). The encounter contract: What is submitted, adjudicated, and recorded when an agent meets a resource the approval could not enumerate, so meaning that arrives late still binds before use: the encounter's routing through drawdown, catalog binding, projection, or fresh approval, and its identity pinning and floors. Home: the discovery companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-discovery]). Resource-Declared Semantics: The full inversion: the resource publishes its operations, their human meaning, and their consequences. Under the OAuth discovery composition, the declaration can be content-addressed by r3_s256 as an additional commitment beside the Mission's integrity anchors, recording what the resource claimed to be at the moment authority bound to it; the declared operations become candidate vocabulary that derivation narrows against. AAuth can instead use R3 as a resource-owned deterministic authorization vocabulary while the private mission blob remains contextual PS governance. R3 content addressing is not a baseline AAuth mission anchor. Home: the discovery and R3 compositions, informative. Behind the five mechanisms sits one direction axis, and the direction is chosen per encounter, not fixed by binding. The family inherits OAuth's client-proposed default: the client names the authority it wants and the resource's meaning arrives through metadata, catalogs, and profiles. Resource-Declared Semantics is the inversion, where the resource speaks first. Where a structured-authority binding commits that meaning at approval, it is enforced at use and translation never widens. Under the OAuth binding the resource- declared direction runs entirely through seams the family already has: the encounter contract routes the declaration ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-discovery]), narrowing-mode derivation consumes the declared operations as candidate vocabulary ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), consent composes the resource-authored material, and the declaration's digest rides the derived authority (the progressive companion's resource_declaration_digest, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]). In AAuth, R3 can describe deterministic resource authorization independently of mission approval; the PS considers the resource request and mission context without turning the R3 declaration into a Mission Authority Set. Proposed RAR-type metadata ([I-D.draft-zehavi-oauth-rar-metadata]), a resource publishing the authorization_details types and fields it understands, is the OAuth- native descriptive surface the direction builds on. Where a deployed semantic-binding mechanism is in force, both directions close the same loop: the meaning source's digest becomes part of the derived authority. A catalog-sourced capability pins its source_digest; a resource declaration pins r3_s256; in each case the Authority Set carries the version of the meaning it was derived under, and the point of use compares against the meaning in force. An ordinary registered authorization_details type can carry stable semantics with neither digest; the loop is closed by the mechanism a deployment runs, not by the family universally. Under such a mechanism, meaning is not consulted at approval and assumed at enforcement; it is committed at approval and re-verified at use. The contract's failure mode is already normative in each home: a consumer that cannot resolve an operation's meaning, a constraint it cannot evaluate, a drifted capability definition, an unrecognized declaration, refuses rather than guesses. Meaning, like state, fails closed. The contract has a dual, and the two statements carry equal force. The resource owns what an action means; the Mission owns why it is happening and where the undertaking stands, and that context exists nowhere else in the stack. A resource evaluates each request at perfect local resolution and zero task resolution: it can price every consequence its ontology names and cannot see the undertaking the request belongs to. This is the context asymmetry, and a risk decision composes both sides of it: semantics without purpose prices every delete the same, and purpose without semantics cannot read the call. "Delete database" in isolation is indistinguishable from catastrophe. "Delete database" inside an approved migration whose copy steps already completed is a priced, checkable step. That judgment needs the undertaking's history, and no resource-local view contains it. The join of Decision and Execution Evidence on the Mission's identity is where that history is reconstructible after the fact; at decision time, a task-aware decision point can draw the same history from trusted prior workflow state or another authoritative source. The runtime profile names the mechanism: sequence-aware evaluation over the undertaking's history is an optional decision input, guarded so that history informs a decision and never widens one ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). 9.2. The Authority Derivation Boundary Deriving the Authority Set from the Mission Intent is the semantic heart of the model and the one step the family deliberately does not standardize. The consequence is a trust boundary worth stating plainly: interoperability begins at the committed result, not at the Intent. A Mission Intent has no portable semantics; two conforming Authorization Servers can derive different Authority Sets from the same Intent, and audit can establish what was derived (against intent_hash and policy_version), never whether it was the right reading of the task. A deployment whose partners must reason about its derivations can publish a derivation policy identifier and test fixtures that pin Intent-to-Authority-Set outcomes, making the local policy reviewable even though it does not travel. Narrowing mode ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) is the checkable path: where the client supplies candidate authority, derivation is a subset of it and reproducible, which is the closest the family comes to portable derivation. The OAuth binding's informative Derivation Policy appendix ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) illustrates that policy artifact: a worked narrowing rule, fixtures, and ownership. The ceiling the derivation narrows against is itself a composition, not a single object. The derived Authority Set sits inside every bound on the task: the issuer's derivation policy, the ceiling of the Mission's established authority source (a delegating person's own authority, a workload's provisioned authority, or governed organizational policy: approval activates authority the source already holds and grants nothing beyond it, and the Approver needs authority to activate the source, not personal possession of its permissions), and, at enforcement time, the resource owner's and deployment's live policy at the decision point. The derivation step intersects the first two and commits the result; the runtime contract re-checks the rest on every action, which is why a permit is never implied by the Authority Set alone. A deployment adding further sources (a tenant boundary, an environment-specific floor) adds them as derivation-policy inputs or as decision-point policy, never as agent-negotiated widening. The derivation modes rank by how portable their result is: +==========================+=================================+ | Derivation mode | Portability status | +==========================+=================================+ | Client proposes concrete | Interoperable default | | authority; AS narrows | | +--------------------------+---------------------------------+ | AS derives from | Profile-specific | | structured Intent fields | | +--------------------------+---------------------------------+ | AS derives from free | Local, non-portable unless | | text | profiled | +--------------------------+---------------------------------+ | LLM-assisted derivation | Advisory unless a deterministic | | | policy commits the output | +--------------------------+---------------------------------+ Table 2 A deployment seeking interoperable authority uses the first; free- text and model-assisted derivation are local policy unless a profile pins them with a published policy identifier, version, and test fixtures. 9.3. Approval Fidelity For the portable-authority bindings, the approval event authenticates the Approver, establishes the Subject, derives and renders the Authority Set for consent, computes the anchors over the consented set, the approved Intent, and, where one was submitted, the authority proposal, and creates the record in active atomically with the decision. AAuth approval has different fidelity: the native propose, clarify, and approve interaction authenticates the parties, returns the approved mission blob and exact-byte s256 commitment, and creates an active Mission Context. It does not render or commit an OAuth Authority Set. Home: the OAuth binding's Mission Approval section. Consumed by Consent Evidence, which binds to this event, and by every downstream guarantee that assumes the anchors, the gating, and the record. 10. The Mission Substrate The binding-neutral contract is Mission Substrate Requirements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]), which states this checklist normatively for any further binding. Its contextual- governance kernel is what every binding provides: a mission-based protocol supplies a Mission Context when it maps these native capabilities explicitly: * a stable reference and controlling authority; * binding to the acting actor; * immutable approved context, or a verifiable commitment to it; * an explicit approval event; * an active-state gate at declared control points; * a stated reliance bound on every governed decision and artifact; * context propagation or decision correlation; and * an ordered governance or audit record. Beyond the kernel, each binding that publishes a Mission Substrate Statement claims through it any of eight optional capabilities (Lifecycle-Gated Authorization, State-Observable, Structured Authority, Monotonic Derivation, Credential-Bound, Authorized Context Correlation, Independently Verifiable, and Portable Evidence), and composes only the profiles whose required capabilities it provides. The OAuth binding publishes no Statement and is mapped to the same capabilities in its informative Mapping Assessment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The companion profiles named without "oauth" are defined against the binding-neutral contract and declare what they consume, each in a Mission Substrate section of its own; the runtime profile is the exemplar of that consumption declaration ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]), and the remaining consumers align progressively. Where a companion consumes a concrete representation, it is the OAuth binding's, the realization the family was first authored against; vocabulary ownership migrates to the substrate contract by touch ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]). The remainder of this section documents that instantiation: eight primitives, each with its normative home and its consumers: six in the table below, the Mission-Bound Credential in its own subsection after Token Classes, and the approval event, whose fidelity is described with the derivation boundary (Section 9.3). None of these OAuth-binding representations or stronger semantics is required verbatim by the binding-neutral kernel, although several instantiate mandatory kernel functions: the identifier and issuer realize the Mission Reference and Controller, the lifecycle realizes the governance gate, token validity participates in bounded reliance, and the audit horizon participates in the governance record. 10.1. The Primitives, at a Glance +==============+========================+================+==============+ |Primitive |The OAuth realization |Normative home |Consumed by | +==============+========================+================+==============+ |Mission |An opaque, non-reused |The OAuth |Every | |Identifier and|identifier with at least|binding: Mission|companion: | |Issuer |128 bits of entropy and |Record, Mission |decisions, | | |no semantic content, |Identifier |evidence, | | |plus the issuer URL; |Format |harness | | |together they name | |bindings, the | | |exactly one Mission. | |state | | |The kernel requires | |surfaces, the | | |stability, non- | |audit | | |reassignment, and | |statement | | |unguessability, not this| |subject, the | | |syntax | |Mandate | +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ |Lifecycle |The states of Section 4,|The OAuth |Runtime per- | |state space |open to companion- |binding (state |class re-check| | |defined states, with the|space, only- |(fail closed | | |only-active rule, fail- |active); the |on staleness),| | |safe unrecognized |status and |harness pause,| | |states, and a freshness |runtime profiles|suppress, and | | |source with a stated |(freshness); |terminate, the| | |staleness bound |Status and |orchestrator's| | | |Signals |unwind | | | |(observation) |trigger, the | | | | |Mandate (state| | | | |as of minting)| +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ |Authority Set |Authorization-details |The OAuth |Runtime and | |representation|entries ([RFC9396]), |binding: Mission|the AuthZEN | | |each naming resource, |Authority, |profile, the | | |actions, and |Subset Rule; the|MAS, Expansion| | |constraints, under the |Mission Resource|and | | |subset rule (derived or |Access Profile: |Completion, | | |delegated authority is |Common |Child | | |never broader) and, for |Constraints |Delegation and| | |mission_resource_access,| |Offline | | |the Common Constraints | |Attenuation, | | |vocabulary (registered | |Consent | | |names with fixed subset | |Evidence, the | | |and intersection rules) | |Mandate | +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ |Integrity- |A committed object |The OAuth |Consent | |anchor |hashed over a typ- |binding: |Evidence, | |envelope |domain-separated, |Integrity |Shaping, the | | |issuer-bound envelope |Anchors, |runtime layer | | |with fixed |Canonicalization|and AuthZEN | | |canonicalization and an |Rules, |profile | | |algorithm-prefixed |Extensibility |(mission- | | |encoding a verifier | |policy-view), | | |recognizes or rejects | |Orchestration,| | |(unknown prefixes | |the Mandate, | | |refuse; no downgrade); | |Audit | | |the typ space is the | |Transparency | | |extension point | | | +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ |Issuer key |Signing keys resolvable |The OAuth |Verifiers of | |material |from issuer; across a |binding: Signing|Mission-bound | | |rotation each key |and Key Rotation|credentials, | | |identifier stays | |Consent | | |resolvable while | |Evidence, the | | |artifacts signed under | |Mandate, the | | |it remain within the | |signed state | | |audit horizon | |surfaces, | | | | |Audit | | | | |Transparency | +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ |Audit horizon |The deployment-declared |The OAuth |Consent and | | |retention window: at |binding: Mission|runtime | | |least the Mission's |Record |evidence and | | |lifetime plus a declared| |Audit | | |post-terminal period | |Transparency | | | | |(retention), | | | | |the MAS | | | | |(record | | | | |retention), | | | | |the security | | | | |model's | | | | |retention | | | | |analysis | +--------------+------------------------+----------------+--------------+ Table 3: Substrate primitives in their OAuth realization The anchors in the envelope row are *commitment anchors*, not enforcement proofs (Section 9.2): a narrowed-token Resource Server enforces the authority it receives rather than reconstructing authority from a hash of a full set it does not hold ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). A Resource Server or policy decision point that needs an independent check retrieves the complete approved set, recomputes its anchor, and checks the carried authority as a subset of it under Mission Approved-Set Verification ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-approved-set-verification]). 10.2. Token Classes "Mission-bound" is a specific claim. This document uses three token shapes descriptively, so a weak one is not read as the strong one; the three names are the OAuth binding's Terminology, and what the strong class requires is the credential-mission-bound equivalence (Section 11.3), which the OAuth binding discharges through its own conformance rule: * a *Mission-referenced token* carries a Mission identifier only; * a *Mission-derived token* carries authority derived from an active Mission; and * a *Mission-bound token* is Mission-derived and additionally active-state gated, subset-constrained, and refresh-gated: in the contract's vocabulary, a credential covered by the binding's Lifecycle-Gated Authorization, Monotonic Derivation, and Credential-Bound claims. Only the third earns the term: a mission claim alone is a reference, not Mission-bound authorization. The family reserves "Mission-bound" for that class. Its definition is the credential-mission-bound equivalence of the binding properties (Section 11.3): six conditions, each mapped to what discharges it, earned only where all hold together. 10.3. The Mission-Bound Credential A credential carrying the mission claim (id, issuer) and Mission- derived authorization details, issued only while the Mission is active. Home: the OAuth binding's Mission-Bound Access Tokens and The Mission Claim sections. The claim's id and issuer are the Mission-identity condition; a token-carried Authority Set commitment is never required for it, per condition 2 of credential-mission-bound (Section 11.3). This is the binding-dependent primitive, and it is exactly where the bindings split. The OAuth binding provides it. The standalone binding does not: the MAS's Mission Substrate section states that a MAS provides neither this credential nor issuance gating ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). An AAuth auth token can carry the native {approver, s256} mission reference, but it does not carry Mission-derived authorization details and therefore is Mission-referenced, not a Mission-bound credential in the strong sense defined above ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). For profiles that compose with it, the seam is the runtime profile's Mission binding establishment step ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]): the credential carries the Mission reference where the binding provides one, and a binding without it supplies an externally established reference, verified under a join the binding defines, which the MAS profiles as its Mission Join. Offline Attenuation attenuates this credential and the token-carriage aspects of delegation ride it, so both require it; the companions that need a credential-to-Mission association (the runtime layer and the harness) route through the binding establishment step, which is what makes the standalone binding possible. The issuance-grant companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]) composes the two: the standalone Mission Issuer mints a Mission Issuance Grant that a consuming Authorization Server redeems for Mission-bound tokens, providing this primitive compositely. 10.4. The Validity Model Five validity horizons govern reliance, each with its own setter, checker, and consequence; implementations most often err by conflating them: Token exp: set by the credential issuer and checked by every consumer of the token. In the OAuth binding it is capped by the Mission's expires_at. Past it the credential is dead and obtaining a new credential re-enters whatever issuance gate the binding and access mode provide. Mission state, and expires_at where defined: set by the controlling authority and checked at the binding's declared control points. In OAuth, the issuance gate, PDP, and state consumers enforce it. In AAuth, the PS enforces active or terminated at PS endpoints and on PS-asserted and federated paths; direct identity-based and resource-managed decisions have no PS state gate. fresh_until: set by the status responder; checked by status consumers. Past it a cached state report may not be relied on and is re-fetched. Permit window: set by the PDP; checked by the executing PEP. Past it the permit is void and a new decision is required. Action-approval freshness: set by the approval surface; checked by the PDP. Past it an action-bound approval no longer authorizes the action it named. The horizons compose by minimum: reliance at any moment requires every applicable horizon to be open, and no horizon substitutes for another. The horizons also give the deployment its freshness dial, and the TTL-only end of that dial is a first-class posture, not a fallback. A deployment that relies on lifetimes alone verifies with local cryptography and a clock: no state source, no freshness discipline, no availability coupling, and a worst-case exposure equal to the lifetime by construction. Where every fresh credential crosses a Mission-state decision point, this realizes the *lifecycle-gated* capability with reliance bounded by credential lifetime alone ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]); it is not a property of every access mode, since AAuth's PS-asserted and federated paths have that gate while its direct modes do not. TTL-only is the right choice at action grain, where an artifact lives seconds to minutes and a revocation landing inside its window has no observation point that could reach the artifact before its own expiry does, and for short missions; the family's own short-lived artifacts (the permit, the cross-domain grant, the Join Assertion) already sit at this end. What a lifetime cannot do is suspend, complete, or kill now, which is the task-grain residue the Mission's state carries and which the *state-observable* capability reaches: an authenticated freshness source with a stated staleness bound, a named substrate capability a binding may provide beyond the kernel's bounded-reliance floor ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]), and the one runtime enforcement requires ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). The two ends are one mechanism seen from opposite sides: a lifetime relocates the freshness check from the verification path to the issuance path, so every re-issuance is the policy re-check, which is the family's gates-new-derivation-only rule in its other reading. A deployment states where it sits on the dial through its bounded- revocation claim (Section 11.2): a TTL-only posture claims the lifetime as its bound only for paths whose re-issuance is gated, with no state-observable overlay. The runtime profile prices each position, source by source, in its state and freshness section ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). 10.5. Binding Security Architectures The authority-bearing bindings are OAuth 2.0, the standalone Mission Authority Server, and (as experimental sketches) UMA 2.0 and GNAP. AAuth composes at the shared Mission Context layer: approval, stable reference, lifecycle gating where the PS is on path, and governance history (Section 4). Peer standing among the bindings is a deployment-topology claim, not a data-model-independence claim: each attaches to its own protocol as an equally adoptable unit, and OAuth is the family's first-authored binding, built on widely deployed OAuth infrastructure, a deployment fact and not a maturity ranking. Adopting Missions on OAuth requires the changes the OAuth binding defines. The two axes diverge for the standalone binding: the Mission Authority Server ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]) is a normative standalone-controller protocol binding over the OAuth Mission data model: a peer deployment topology, but not an independent substrate model, since it normatively imports the OAuth Mission record and issuance profile. AAuth demonstrates model independence: it maps the shared kernel onto its own protocol's native Mission Context without importing the OAuth Authority Set ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). Peer standing implies neither identical capabilities nor identical adoption cost: AAuth, natively contextual, adds no new wire members, and each binding declares what it supplies, in a Mission Substrate Statement or, for the OAuth binding, an informative Mapping Assessment. The bindings share Mission Context capabilities but are not one security system: each has its own authority representation, trust assumptions, cutoff behavior, and failure modes, and a deployment names its architecture, not only its binding. Three patterns cover the bindings: * *credential-carried authority*: the credential names the Mission, carries derived authority, and issuance is gated (the OAuth AS, UMA AS, and GNAP AS); * *PDP-joined*: credentials are ordinary and a join establishes the association at the decision point (the standalone MAS); and * *context-carried*: AAuth carries its native {approver, s256} reference while authority remains in resource scopes and policy. The PS gates PS-asserted and federated authorization, while direct identity-based and resource-managed decisions bypass the PS. The differences that decide a design: +============+=========+==========+==========+==============+=============+ |Property |OAuth AS |MAS |AAuth PS |UMA AS |GNAP AS | | | | | |(sketch) |(sketch) | +============+=========+==========+==========+==============+=============+ |Credential |yes |no |native |yes (claim or |yes | |carries the |(mission | |reference |introspection)|(protected | |Mission |claim) | |where | |mission claim| | | | |supported | |or | | | | | | |introspection| | | | | | |assertion) | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ |Issuance |yes |no (the |PS- |yes |yes | |gated on | |issuance |asserted | |(issuance, | |state | |grant |and | |grant | | | |restores |federated | |modification,| | | |it per |only | |and rotation)| | | |consuming | | | | | | |AS) | | | | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ |Runtime PDP |no |yes |none from |no (per-use |no (issuance | |required for|(issuance|(runtime |the |introspection |gate exists; | |a kill |gate |is the |binding |cuts off) |per-use | |switch |exists; |only |for direct| |introspection| | |runtime |cutoff) |modes; PS-| |cuts off | | |tightens)| |path | |where | | | | |issuance | |deployed) | | | | |has a | | | | | | |bounded | | | | | | |cutoff | | | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ |Join |no |yes |no when |no |no (native | |ambiguity | |(bounded |the native| |binding; no | |possible | |by join |reference | |cross- | | | |assurance)|is | |authority | | | | |preserved;| |join) | | | | |it can be | | | | | | |ignored in| | | | | | |direct | | | | | | |modes | | | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ |Revocation |token |runtime |auth-token|next |token | |latency |lifetime,|and status|lifetime |introspection |lifetime, or | |source |status, |only |on PS | |the declared | | |or | |paths; no | |introspection| | |runtime | |Mission | |cache bound | | | | |cutoff on | | | | | | |direct | | | | | | |paths | | | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ |Offline |partial |limited |reference |JWT RPTs |partial with | |Mission |(claims |(join |integrity |partial; |a structured | |verification|verify; |assertion)|only; blob|opaque RPTs |token or | | |state | |is private|none |signed | | |does not)| | | |Mission | | | | | | |Status | +------------+---------+----------+----------+--------------+-------------+ Table 4 The table is the one-page answer to a question the object-level framing invites: a MAS deployment does not provide AS-native semantics just because both hold the same Mission, and a reader comparing deployments compares architectures first. The OAuth binding stacks two independent chokepoints. Issuance gating acts at the token layer: a revoked or expired Mission stops all further derivation and refresh, and short-lived tokens age out. Runtime enforcement acts at the action layer: each consequential action is re-checked against current state at the point of use. Issuance gating plus runtime enforcement is strictly stronger than either alone: a gap in PEP coverage is still bounded at the token layer, and an outstanding token is still stopped at the action layer. AAuth supplies the Mission Context capabilities in its own idiom but not a portable Authority Set or universal subset rule. The AAuth binding also has a narrower structural chokepoint. The Person Server refuses new PS-asserted issuance or federated brokering for a terminated Mission Context, bounding those paths by auth-token lifetime. Identity-based and resource-managed decisions do not cross that chokepoint. The AAuth binding defines no generic family runtime composition or independently resource-verifiable Authority Set ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). Per-action enforcement is budgeted, not blanket: only consequential actions are gated, the common-case decision is a local evaluation against a materialized policy view whose network cost is paid per freshness window, and only the high-consequence classes are required by the runtime profile to hold a synchronous gate (the runtime profile's deployment considerations, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). The composition is an overlay, not a substrate swap: a deployment mediates the paths where the high-consequence classes live and lets every other resource ride lifetime-bounded reliance (Section 11), token lifetimes sized to the tolerated staleness, with no state evaluation at the resource. The standalone mode trades the token-layer kill switch for zero Authorization Server changes. A MAS creates, approves, and serves Missions while tokens remain ordinary; the PDP joins credentials to Missions, and the MAS is the freshness source. The cost is structural: no mission claim travels, revoking a Mission stops nothing at the token layer, and enforcement rests entirely on PEP coverage, so a token exercised outside that coverage is ungoverned (the MAS's Limitations section). The path to a token- layer chokepoint is the OAuth binding, where the estate's AS can change; the record, anchors, and lifecycle carry over unchanged. That is a move between peer architectures, not an upgrade from a lesser one: the MAS remains a peer binding, not a staging area (its own document's framing). Between the two sits the issuance join ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]): the MAS remains the Mission Issuer while estate Authorization Servers redeem Mission Issuance Grants for Mission-bound, state-gated tokens, restoring the token-layer chokepoint without moving approval. 11. Mission Assurance Levels This document uses six frames for what a deployment does and what it can show. Each answers a different question, and none substitutes for another: +=============+=======================================+=========+ | Frame | Question it answers | Where | +=============+=======================================+=========+ | Verbs | What happens to a Mission and its | Section | | | authority | 7 | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ | Assurance | Which capabilities a deployment | this | | levels | adopts, in the order deployments | section | | | build them | | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ | Assurance | What a relying party can verify | Section | | claims | | 11.2 | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ | Binding | Which relationships a path | Section | | properties | establishes: Mission attachment, | 11.3 | | | credential binding (with presenter | | | | key and instance), and action binding | | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ | Containment | What a capability kill reaches, per | Section | | properties | action class and state source | 11.4, | | | | Section | | | | 11.5 | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ | Deployment | Where a deployment declares all of | Section | | Profile | the above | 12.6 | +-------------+---------------------------------------+---------+ Table 5: Assurance frames The levels are *adoption bundles*: which documents a deployment runs, named so a deployment, a procurement, or a review can cite one bundle. They are guidance, never a conformance class, an earned label, or a ladder a deployment must climb; a deployment adopts the bundle its risk warrants and stops there. A level does not determine any action class's containment property, and the proof obligations noted with each level are the claims that become available at that bundle, not properties the level name asserts. A relying party compares claims, not levels (Section 11.2), because the family's strongest properties are deployment properties, not protocol properties: complete PEP placement, a trusted freshness source, and credential custody are things a deployment does, not things a token proves. The levels build on one another in the order deployments build: recording and governing the approved task (Baseline Issuance), then per-action enforcement (Runtime-Enforced), then agent governance and compromise resistance (Governed Agent and High-Assurance Agent). The binding is an orthogonal axis, and a binding is not a level. The authority-bearing bindings name their level separately from their binding. The standalone MAS is the case that matters most: it provides the Mission record, lifecycle, and authority but no Mission- bound credential and no issuance gating, so under it the kill switch is the runtime layer alone, not the token gate, and a deployment states that. An AAuth deployment reports the Mission Context capabilities and resource access modes it actually uses instead of a level. Selecting the AAuth binding does not by itself satisfy structured-authority, subset, portable-evidence, or runtime proof obligations; its lifecycle gate covers PS-asserted and federated access but not identity-based or resource-managed access; and its native auth token is Mission-referenced, not Mission-bound (Section 10.2). The levels, cumulative: *Baseline Issuance*: the approved, anchored Mission record and its lifecycle: authority derived and committed at the approval event with the integrity anchors (the OAuth binding). Where a structured-authority binding issues Mission-bound credentials, issuance is bounded by the subset rule and gated on Mission state, which grants task-bound, auditable authority and a possession-independent kill switch at the issuance gate; it grants no per-action control, and outstanding tokens run to their own expiry. Sized deliberately, that expiry is the level's revocation bound: *lifetime-bounded reliance*, access-token lifetimes no longer than the deployment's tolerated staleness ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]), gives a quantified cutoff, revocation within one token lifetime, with no Resource Server changes and no status traffic; expiry closes the temporal bound by the clock alone, observing no revocation, suspension, completion, or containment, which is why the lifetime must not exceed the tolerated staleness. Revocation latency is a number, not a level: what the higher levels add is per-action enforcement, parameter binding, and evidence, not a faster clock. Under a binding without credential-carried authority (the standalone MAS), Baseline grants governance and audit; no kill switch of any kind exists until a freshness surface (the half-step named under Proof obligations below) and runtime enforcement (the next level) arrive, and a deployment states that; the issuance join ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]) restores gated issuance at each consuming Authorization Server, and Baseline with it. The nearest AAuth comparison, stated as capabilities rather than a level: native approval, exact-byte commitment, active or terminated state, and the ordered mission log. The possession- independent issuance cutoff applies only to PS-asserted and federated requests whose resource token carries the validated Mission Reference; no Authority Set or subset proof is implied. Proof obligations: the anchored approval and, where credentials are issued, the subset rule. Where the binding gates issuance, a deployment that adds only a freshness surface, Mission Status or introspection with a published staleness bound ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]), gains state-aware reliance, a revocation cutoff within that bound, without per- action enforcement: a half-step into the next level, not a level of its own. Illustrative verification scenarios for this level, each traced to the rule its home document states, are in Appendix E. *Runtime-Enforced*: adds a PEP/PDP decision on every consequential action, a trusted state source with a published staleness bound, parameter binding, and runtime evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime] and its AuthZEN profile). Grants per-action enforcement and revocation bounded, for gated classes, by the staleness bound plus the permit window plus the class's execution bound, and by token lifetime, where issuance is gated, for paths no runtime gate reaches. This is the smallest deployment that turns a Mission from governed issuance into action-time defense, and every normative dependency it needs is a family document intended for the Standards Track; it is a substantial build, not a wedge, and a deployment sizes the effort from the runtime profile's conformance section rather than from this level's one-line summary. Proof obligations: PEP-placement completeness and the declared freshness source and bound. Documents: Baseline plus the substrate contract (the kernel that runtime and AuthZEN consume normatively), runtime, its AuthZEN profile, runtime evidence, and a concrete freshness source, Status being the reference choice. *Governed Agent* (recommended for AI agents): adds Consent Evidence and the harness, growing with Child Delegation, Expansion, Orchestration, and Discovery (experimental, with Progressive) as needed. Grants consent-rendering evidence and session-continuity discipline. Documents: Runtime-Enforced plus consent-evidence and the harness. *High-Assurance Agent*: adds the guarantees that resist a compromised agent. Two named claims live at this level, each with proof obligations the runtime profile fixes. *Agent-compromise-resistant enforcement*: mediated (gateway) credential custody, a declared-and-audited path scope, action- bound approval for the high-consequence classes, an active- freshness state source, and approval disclosures rendered by a component isolated from the agent, so a compromised agent cannot unilaterally take a high-consequence action for which it does not hold a mediated credential. *Trifecta containment*: least exposure, the harness taint rule enforced as a mandatory requirement of the harness profile, with pre-consented egress to Approver-named destinations as its one carve-out, and full mediation of the external-communication and external-commitment classes with the egress-channel enumeration, so an injected agent cannot egress on the strength of untrusted content alone. These are named high bars, never implied by basic adoption; a deployment can bind its Enforcement Scope Statement to execution- environment attestation so a claim is technical rather than organizational ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]). Read as an adoption ladder, each level makes a broader class of agent work defensible to grant. The mapping is informative: the action classes are the runtime profile's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]), resource policy remains authoritative for its own objects, and what a level grants varies with the binding; the Mission Deployment Profile (Section 12.6) is where a deployment states its own mediated_action_classes and exclusions. +==================+===========================================+ | Level | What a deployment can defensibly grant | +==================+===========================================+ | Baseline | Consequential reads and writes outside | | Issuance | the high-consequence classes whose bounds | | | the receiving Resource Server enforces, | | | attributable and killable at the issuance | | | gate, outstanding tokens running to their | | | own expiry or the next introspection | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+ | Runtime-Enforced | Consequential actions that need a per- | | | action decision: parameter-bound writes | | | and bounds finer than the receiving | | | Resource Server enforces; reversal and | | | compensation stay the orchestration | | | profile's, where adopted | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+ | Governed Agent | Unattended operation and delegation, with | | | Consent Evidence binding each approval | | | event | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+ | High-Assurance | The high-consequence classes | | Agent | ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]), | | | under mediated custody and action-bound | | | approval | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+ Table 6 Every level above Baseline Issuance also carries the cross-cutting obligations its mechanisms imply: * operation-profile normalization where duration or parameter digests are metered ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]); * evidence retention for the audit horizon; and * a registration schedule where audit transparency is run ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). The evidence mechanisms are accountability, not prevention: they make what was recorded tamper-evident, not what was perceived true or what was never recorded present. 11.1. The Reference Architecture The four levels are also the four reference stacks deployments actually take, each containing the previous. The stacks are expressed in the OAuth realization; a peer binding realizes the levels per its own document, and peer standing does not imply identical rungs or capabilities. The family manifest records each stack's exact membership. * *Protocol core* (Baseline Issuance): the OAuth binding alone, the standardizable primitive of approved, anchored, state-gated Missions, meeting the Mission Context requirements (Appendix A). * *Reference security architecture* (Runtime-Enforced): the protocol core plus runtime enforcement, its AuthZEN profile, runtime evidence (the decision and execution objects AuthZEN consumes), and a freshness source, Status being the reference choice; the substrate contract arrives with them as runtime and AuthZEN's normative kernel, by adoption closure. This is the architecture this document means when it says a Mission is enforced, and the one an evaluation should picture by default. It presumes an authority-bearing binding; under AAuth the analogous per-action control is the Person Server's contextual gate on PS-mediated paths ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). * *Recommended agent architecture* (Governed Agent): what a deployment running autonomous AI agents should build. * *High-assurance architecture* (High-Assurance Agent). 11.2. Assurance Claims The levels are the adoption ladder: what a deployment has built, in the order deployments build it. What a deployment can prove is an orthogonal axis, claimed as named *assurance claims*, each with a proof obligation an existing profile fixes, and listed in the Deployment Profile (Section 12.6) rather than implied by a level: * *Approved-record integrity*: the anchors reproduce from the record alone (the OAuth binding's integrity anchors). * *Bounded revocation latency*, per path and mechanism, the claim naming the paths it covers: for a runtime-gated class, the published staleness bound plus the permit window plus the class's execution bound ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); for a lifecycle-gated path, the outstanding credential lifetime; an ungated path has no bound to claim. * *Action-time enforcement*: PEP coverage for the Enforcement Scope Statement's mediated set, and nothing outside it. * *Parameter-bound enforcement*: permits bound to concrete parameters for the classes claimed. * *Transaction-grade execution*: the runtime profile's transaction- assurance tier machinery (single-use permits, leases, outcome reconciliation) for the classes claimed ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). * *Agent-compromise-resistant enforcement* and *trifecta containment*: the two named High-Assurance claims, unchanged (Section 11). Two deployments at the same level under different bindings can hold different claims; the MAS modes are the worked case ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). The claims, not the level, are what a relying party compares. 11.3. Mission Binding Properties Whether an operation is bound to a Mission is not one question but three independent ones: who selected and attached the Mission to this work item (attachment provenance), whether the acting credential's authority was issued and bounded for the Mission (credential binding), and whether one authenticated permit covers these exact operation inputs (action binding). The dimensions are independent: a native Mission-bound token has strong credential binding with no harness in sight, a trusted harness attributes work items precisely while the credential is an ordinary bearer token, and an action-bound permit can exist over either. No single ladder orders them, so the family names the properties directly, as a vector, and a deployment claims the combination each path actually has. +===========+=============+==================================================+ |Property |Meaning |Minimum proof | +===========+=============+==================================================+ |mission- |A Mission |The canonical (issuer, mission id) pair; grants | |reference- |tuple was |nothing and makes no security claim | |selected |supplied for | | | |routing and | | | |selection | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |work-item- |A trusted |An authenticated attacher, a tamper-resistant | |bound |component |work-item identifier, and stated inheritance and | | |bound that |retry rules | | |tuple to this| | | |session, | | | |queue, or | | | |task item | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |credential-|The presented|A mapping join or Mission Join Assertion | |correlated |credential is|([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]),| | |correlated to|with its stated ceiling | | |the Mission's| | | |parties | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |credential-|The |The six equivalence properties below | |mission- |credential's | | |bound |authority was| | | |issued or | | | |derived for | | | |the Mission | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |presenter- |The presenter|Issuance-time key targeting (cnf or an equivalent | |key-bound |proves |confirmation) plus presentation-time proof of | | |possession of|possession | | |the key the | | | |credential is| | | |constrained | | | |to | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |instance- |The concrete |presenter-key-bound plus the instance requirements| |bound |acting |below | | |instance is | | | |identified | | | |and holds the| | | |bound key | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ |action- |An |One of the two proof forms below | |bound |authenticated| | | |permit | | | |authorizes | | | |one | | | |operation, | | | |resource, and| | | |input | | | |projection | | +-----------+-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ Table 7: Mission binding properties The properties are claimed per covered Authorization Server, resource, and action path, never as a product-wide maximum: a mixed estate claims what each path has, and a weaker path never inherits a stronger path's claim from the deployment's name. Where policy requires a property on a path, its absence denies; nothing falls back silently to a weaker binding. *Credential-mission-bound* is defined by equivalence, not by one artifact, and is the family's authoritative definition of what earns the term "Mission-bound" (see also Section 10.2's Mission-bound token class, which this equivalence backs). A binding that claims substrate conformance evidences the definition through the capability claims of its own Mission Substrate Statement, not by protocol lineage. The OAuth binding claims no substrate conformance and publishes no Statement: it is assessed through its own informative Mapping Assessment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) and discharges the definition directly through its own Conformance gates, independent of the substrate contract. For the covered path the credential establishes all of these conditions: 1. a trusted issuer authorized to issue for the Mission; 2. the canonical (mission.issuer, mission.id) pair identifying the Mission: the baseline Mission reference, and an identity condition only, never a token-carried Authority Set commitment; 3. an issued authority projection no broader than the Mission's Authority Set for the target audience; 4. the mapped subject, the requesting client_id, and actor or delegation context where applicable; 5. bounded lifetime plus active-state issuance and refresh gates; and 6. an auditable derivation link from the credential to the Mission's recorded Authority Set: the OAuth binding's Mission Record ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), an Issuance Grant jti ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]), a cross- domain projection's provenance ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]), or an equivalently specified artifact. A token-carried Authority Set commitment, where a binding supplies one, strengthens this condition's local verifiability; it is never itself the Mission- identity requirement of condition 2, and its absence does not fail this condition where the issuer-retained record is otherwise reachable. Each condition names what actually establishes it, so a Statement capability claim maps to a condition rather than to the property as a whole: condition 3 is the Substrate Statement's Monotonic Derivation capability, and condition 5's active-state gate is its Lifecycle- Gated Authorization capability. The Substrate's Credential-Bound capability can select correlation-only fact semantics ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]), which by itself evidences neither the derivation-link condition (6) nor the authority- projection condition (3); a Credential-Bound claim alone, whatever semantics it selects, never by itself evidences credential-mission- bound, since conditions 1 and 4 come from the deployment's issuer trust configuration and the credential's own subject, client_id, and actor claims, never from a Statement capability row. A binding earns the property only where its Statement's claims jointly cover every condition. For the OAuth binding, the approval event discharges condition 4, the subset rule discharges condition 3, the lifecycle gate discharges condition 5's active-state gate, the Mission Issuer role discharges condition 1, and the same approval event's Mission Record, retained for the audit horizon, discharges condition 6 ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Sender constraint is deliberately not among them: issuance-time key targeting and presentation-time proof are presenter-key-bound, a separate property, so a path that needs possession requires the composition rather than reading it into the equivalence. That is also what the mechanisms support: the OAuth binding recommends sender-constrained tokens and the generic Issuance Grant leaves cnf optional, so native issuance, the Mission Issuance Grant, and a conforming cross-domain exchange satisfy this one property, and supply presenter-key-bound exactly where their confirmation binding is actually in force. A Mission Join Assertion fails conditions 3, 5, and 6 by design, which is what separates correlation from issuance. *Presenter-key-bound* is possession and nothing more: the credential names a confirmation key at issuance, and the presenter proves possession at use, with DPoP or mutual TLS. It does not identify which concrete agent process or workload holds the key. *Instance-bound* requires all of: an authenticated instance identifier; a verified binding from that identity to the confirmation key; current proof of possession; and no key sharing across instances. End-to-end sender constraint alone establishes presenter- key-bound, never this property. *Action-bound* requires an authenticated permit binding the Mission, the action and resource, and the normalized parameters or complete request projection, under the permit's validity and use controls, in one of two proof forms: * *portable permit*: an audience-restricted, presenter- or sender- bound artifact, verified where it is presented; the transaction token of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-transaction-authorization] is the family's discharge; or * *channel-bound permit*: a permit bound to the mutually authenticated requesting and executing parties and enforced on that same channel, with request cache-key equality, its validity window, and the applicable use controls; the runtime permit of the AuthZEN profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]) discharges it under exactly those conditions. A parameter binding alone makes a response neither form, and an evaluation identifier alone is a correlator, never the property: it qualifies only where dereferencing it through an authenticated, audience-bound, freshness- and use-controlled permit store yields one of the two forms above, complete. Deployments claim compositions, and a claimed composition requires every member property: * *harness-attributed*: work-item-bound, under the attacher and inheritance rules the harness states ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]); * *mission-credential-bound*: credential-mission-bound plus presenter-key-bound, end to end; instance-bound strengthens the claim where an instance identity exists and is verified; and * *runtime-action-bound*: authoritative Mission establishment plus action-bound. A work-item-attribution composition is deliberately absent. work- item-bound and action-bound holding together does not prove the permitted action came from that work item: concurrent items under one Mission still substitute. The composition becomes definable only when a verified cross-link exists, the action permit or its authenticated request context binding the same tamper-resistant work- item identifier the harness recorded; no family carrier supplies that, so a deployment claims the two properties separately and nothing more. The mechanism mapping is conservative: a propagated Mission-Reference is selection only; a mapping join is credential-correlated, with its equivalence-class ambiguity; a Mission Join Assertion is a stronger, token- and key-specific credential-correlated, still never issuance; a trusted harness supplies work-item-bound where its attacher requirements hold; a native or issuance-grant-derived token is credential-mission-bound, and presenter-key-bound where its confirmation binding is in force end to end; Instance Context whose association with the presenter is established, over an instance- unique confirmation key and, for context preserved from an input token, authenticated provenance ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id], Sections 7.3 and 7.5), is what makes a path instance-bound; a verified transaction token is the portable action-bound form, and an AuthZEN runtime permit is the channel-bound form under that binding's conditions. The property names above are stable identifiers, and a claim is a per-path declaration, not prose: each claimed property or composition names the covered issuer, resource, and action-class paths. The Enforcement Scope Statement carries the per-path declarations for the enforcement-adjacent properties, and the Mission Deployment Profile (Section 12.6) composes them; a binding's Statement declares what the binding can supply, which is never itself a deployment claim. An unknown property identifier, an undeclared path, or an unstated property is not claimed, and a consumer treats it as not held; nothing downgrades silently. Schema-level claim identifiers and validation rules remain the Deployment Profile's own future work. Binding properties and the assurance claims above compose rather than repeat: a binding property says what a path establishes, from the Mission a work item is attached to through the credential, presenter key, and instance to the authorized action; an assurance claim says what the deployment's enforcement proves. Credential-level and action-level binding likewise compose rather than substitute. 11.4. The Containment Matrix Mission termination is one control in a larger containment surface. Each kill has a different blast radius, and an incident responder needs the whole matrix: +==========+=============+=======================================================+ |Control |Stops |Home | +==========+=============+=======================================================+ |Capability|one |the issuer-held containment overlay | |kill |capability |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]) | | |within one | | | |Mission: new | | | |derivation at| | | |once at | | | |commit; | | | |credentials | | | |already | | | |materialized | | | |under it run | | | |to their own | | | |bound unless | | | |a | | | |containment- | | | |aware action-| | | |time gate | | | |reaches them | | | |first | | | |(Section | | | |11.5); the | | | |body of work | | | |still runs | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Mission |one body of |the OAuth binding's revocation; cascades to Child | |kill |work: new |Missions | | |derivation at|([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation])| | |once, and | | | |residual | | | |credentials | | | |at the | | | |earliest of | | | |revocation, | | | |re-check, or | | | |their own | | | |expiry | | | |(Section | | | |10.4) | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Agent kill|all work by |the deployment's agent IAM (Section 6.2) | | |one agent, | | | |across its | | | |Missions | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Agent |every |the deployment's change governance (Section 6.2) | |Deployment|instance | | |kill |running a | | | |compromised | | | |version | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Credential|credentials |the binding's substrate, where it supports revocation; | |kill |already |otherwise expiry (Section 10.4) | | |issued | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Workload |the running |the platform | |kill |compute | | | |itself | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ |Egress |the |gateway and network controls | |kill |communication| | | |path | | +----------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------+ Table 8 Mission termination participates in incident response; it does not replace it. Revoking the Mission stops issuance at once where the binding gates it, and stops mediated actions within the staleness bound plus the permit window and the class's execution bound (Section 10.4), but it terminates no process and closes no network path. The converse holds too: killing a workload leaves the Mission active and its authority derivable to a replacement instance unless the Mission is also revoked. Capability kill provides, per action class and consumer, one of two containment properties or neither, never by the deployment's assurance level ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section "Containment Properties"): the Baseline property, a new- derivation kill that also propagates to Child Missions justified by the contained entry, and the Runtime-Enforced property, an action- time kill that also reaches a token issued before the transition. A standalone MAS path with no runtime gate gets neither. Section 11.5 composes the properties by rung and binding, with what each leaves running. A deployment's incident runbook names which of these controls exist, who may pull each, and, per action class, which capability-kill property its consumers obtain. 11.5. Composed Kill-Switch Reality "Baseline" and "Runtime-Enforced" name two different things that share spelling. Above, they name a level a deployment adopts. The containment profile uses the same two words for a property a consumer obtains per action class ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section "Containment Properties"). The two are not 1:1: a Runtime- Enforced deployment can still provide only the Baseline property for a class its Enforcement Scope Statement leaves lifecycle-gated-only, because the property requires a state-observable substrate per class, not per deployment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). The table below names the property in its own column, apart from the rung; a row can carry a Runtime-Enforced rung and a Baseline property together without contradiction. The table composes a deployment that runs the containment profile with a rung and a binding. A rung and a binding alone confer neither containment property: containment is an overlay a deployment separately adopts ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]). "Stops at commit" names what a contain transition's own state-version commit reaches immediately ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section "The Contain Transition"); "runs to its own bound" names the residual the transition does not reach. +========+============+=====================================================+==================================================+=====================================================+ |Rung |Binding |Property |Stops at commit |Runs to its own bound | +========+============+=====================================================+==================================================+=====================================================+ |Baseline|OAuth |Baseline, a new-derivation kill |New derivation, delegation, cross-domain |Tokens already issued, to exp; a cross-domain | |Issuance|binding, |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], |projection, and offline attenuation roots minted |projection grant already redeemed and an offline | | |structured- |Section "Containment Properties") |after the transition |attenuation root already minted before the | | |authority | |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment],|transition, each to its own lifetime or del_max_depth| | | | |Section "Derivation Gating") |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], | | | | | |Section "The Materialized-Capability Residual"); a | | | | | |consequential read under the token-lifetime default, | | | | | |the same bound | | | | | |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]) | +--------+------------+-----------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |Baseline|Standalone |Neither; the runtime layer is the only cutoff, and it|Nothing at the resource; the transition commits |Every action, to whatever native credential, session,| |Issuance|MAS, no |is absent at this rung |and is visible on the Mission Status Response and |or resource-local bound the resource enforces on its | | |credential- | |the introspection projection |own, if any, until runtime enforcement over a | | |carried | |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment],|freshness source arrives or the issuance join | | |authority | |Section "Visibility") |restores a gate | | | | | |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant])| +--------+------------+-----------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |Runtime-|Any binding,|Runtime-Enforced for that class |The contained capability, denied at the class's |Paths no action-time gate reaches: token lifetime | |Enforced|a class |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], |next gated action once the source reflects the |where issuance is gated, otherwise no bound | | |using a |Section "Containment Properties"): full Status or |overlay, within the staleness bound plus the | | | |containment-|introspection carrying containment_version, or |permit window plus the class's execution bound | | | |aware state |Signals carrying the overlay change; a fresh |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]) | | | |source |derivation narrows what it mints and can shorten the | | | | |within its |residual, but it checks nothing at action time, so it| | | | |published |carries Baseline, not Runtime-Enforced | | | | |bound |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], | | | | | |Section "Containment Properties"); a class checked | | | | | |only against an active-but-not-containment-aware | | | | | |source, gated only by fresh derivation, or left | | | | | |lifecycle-gated-only, gets Baseline only regardless | | | | | |of rung ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]) | | | +--------+------------+-----------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |Baseline|MAS as |Baseline, from Derivation Gating at the Mission |New grant minting only: the Mission Issuer's |An outstanding grant redeems once, to its own maximum| |Issuance|estate |Issuer |Derivation Gating evaluates the Effective |lifetime of 300 seconds, at any consuming AS whose | | |control |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], |Authority Set, so a grant minted after the |redemption check is active-only rather than | | |plane, |Section "Derivation Gating"); the consuming AS's |transition excludes contained authority |containment-aware | | |issuance |redemption and refresh checks are the issuance |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment],|([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant],| | |join at each|profile's ordinary active gate, not containment-aware|Section "Derivation Gating") |Section "Redemption") | | |consuming AS|on their own, since a contained Mission stays active,| | | | | |unless the consuming AS separately retrieves and | | | | | |applies the containment overlay or current Effective | | | | | |Authority Set | | | | | |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant],| | | | | |Section "Redemption") | | | +--------+------------+-----------------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ Table 9 None of this closes the conforming Baseline residual on a path or for a class no containment-aware action-time gate reaches. For a class a Runtime-Enforced action-time gate reaches instead, a pre-transition credential does not run to its own bound at all. The binding determines the artifact and its cutoff where the residual does persist: an ungated standalone-MAS path, for instance, runs to whatever native credential, session, or resource-local bound the resource enforces on its own, if any, or to none, not to a token lifetime. What changes row to row is which gate, if any, reaches a class before its own bound, and how tight that bound is. 11.6. Prevention, Detection, and Residue Each layer earns a specific property and leaves a specific residue. Stated as a table so a claim cannot be read as more than it is: +==============+=====================+============+==============+ | Mechanism | Prevents | Detects | Does not | | | | | solve | +==============+=====================+============+==============+ | Core | over-issuance | the | action-time | | issuance | beyond the approved | approved | misuse | | | authority; issuance | authority | within scope | | | after revocation or | (anchored) | | | | expiry | | | +--------------+---------------------+------------+--------------+ | Runtime | an unauthorized | each PDP/ | actions on | | enforcement | action on a | PEP | an | | | mediated path | decision | unmediated | | | | (evidence) | path | +--------------+---------------------+------------+--------------+ | Consent | silent divergence | the | whether a | | Evidence | between what was | rendered | human | | | shown and what was | disclosure | perceived or | | | committed | | understood | | | | | it | +--------------+---------------------+------------+--------------+ | Audit | undetectable log | the | a producer | | Transparency | tampering or | evidence | logging a | | | omission (under | timeline | false record | | | expected | | | | | registration) | | | +--------------+---------------------+------------+--------------+ | Mandate | reliance on | portable | authority | | | unverifiable | Mission | (it grants | | | committed facts | facts | none) | +--------------+---------------------+------------+--------------+ Table 10 The pattern is uniform: the family commits and checks what a party was shown, decided, or did; it does not make the human attentive, the producer honest, or the unmediated path disappear. Those are the residues the Mission Assurance Levels (Section 11) and the security model make a deployment state rather than assume, and the exposure arm (Section 4.2) carries the same honesty in the other direction. 12. Mission Deployment Patterns 12.1. Entry Ramps by Estate Which chokepoint a deployment builds first is decided by the estate it already runs, not by preference. The OAuth binding's issuance ramp assumes an Authorization Server that supports pushed authorization requests, rich authorization requests, and JWT access tokens; the standalone ramp assumes none of that and trades it for PEP coverage. By starting condition: +=============+==========+=====================================================+ |Estate |Entry ramp|Day-one delta | |starting | | | |condition | | | +=============+==========+=====================================================+ |AS |The OAuth |AS adds intent intake, derivation, approval, record, | |changeable; |binding |and gating; a Mission-creating client changes with | |PAR, RAR, and| |it, submitting mission_intent through PAR and | |JWT access | |handling Mission responses and lifecycle refusals; | |tokens in | |scope-only Resource Servers continue unchanged at | |place | |scope grain, per-entry constraints reaching them only| | | |through a projection or a PEP | +-------------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |AS |MAS first;|A MAS beside the AS; tokens are unchanged, while | |changeable; |the OAuth |governance requires approval integration and Mission | |RAR absent or|binding |correlation, and enforcement waits on PEP/PDP | |tokens opaque|once the |coverage with a trustworthy join | | |AS gains | | | |the token | | | |plane (a | | | |peer move,| | | |not an | | | |upgrade) | | +-------------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |AS cannot |Standalone|Records and approvals first; enforcement arrives with| |change |MAS, phase|PEP/PDP coverage | |(shared, |by phase | | |third-party, | | | |SaaS) | | | +-------------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |Many |MAS as |Each AS adds grant redemption only | |Authorization|estate |([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant])| |Servers, one |control | | |governance |plane; | | |point |issuance | | | |join per | | | |consuming | | | |AS | | +-------------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------+ |No PEP/PDP |The OAuth |Lifetime-bounded reliance (short tokens, gated | |over |binding |refresh); the runtime overlay added later, where the | |consequential|where the |high-consequence classes live | |paths |AS allows;| | | |the | | | |runtime | | | |layer | | | |where a | | | |class | | | |needs it | | +-------------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------+ Table 11 Every row shares the record, anchors, and lifecycle, so a ramp is an entry point, not a fork: Missions carry unchanged from any row to the rows a deployment adopts later. 12.2. The Issuance-Only Deployment The last row of the entry-ramp table is a deployment in its own right, the *issuance-only deployment*: the Authorization Server and the Mission-creating client change, and Resource Servers need not be Mission-aware. A delegated token reaches only a Mission-aware Resource Server, so a delegate calling any other resource runs under a Child Mission where child creation is authorized ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). The OAuth binding's invariants carry the deployment: every derived token is a subset of the Authority Set, no audience receives a grant it would over-grant on, and no credential outlives the Mission's expiry; the deployment sizes token lifetime to its tolerated staleness. Where the Authorization Server offers introspection, a Resource Server that introspects per request stops honoring a token at its next request once the Mission leaves active, with no Mission-specific code ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The deployment claims approved-record integrity and bounded revocation latency (Section 11.2), and Appendix F shows its Deployment Profile. The runtime layer ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]) joins for the high-consequence classes and for an action class that needs per- action evaluation or evidence, approval bound to a single action, or a bound the receiving Resource Server cannot enforce. 12.3. The Short Mission One ramp cuts across the rows: the *short mission*. A Mission whose expires_at sits minutes out, run in records mode with lifetime- bounded reliance, is a durable approval record with TTL-grade operational cost: audit, anchors, and bounded exposure with no external state-observation surface, the issuer still owning Mission state and the issuance gate (Section 10.4). A deployment can adopt the family this way first, per task, and add state surfaces only where missions grow long enough to need suspend, complete, or kill- now. 12.4. The Quarantine Pattern The quarantine pattern removes a leg of the injection-to-exfiltration chain instead of gating it: no single Mission ever holds untrusted input and an egress path at once. * Work that ingests untrusted content runs under a Mission with no external-communication or external-commitment authority. * Work that communicates externally runs under a separate Mission whose inputs are the quarantined product. * The crossing between them, a human review or a deterministic transformation, is recorded as evidence, under the harness taint policy ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]) and, where claimed, the runtime profile's trifecta containment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). The quarantine pattern is the deployment-shaped case of the work- products reading of the invariants (Section 8): a work product is input, not authority, and the producing Mission's authority does not transfer through the artifact by copying, referencing, embedding, or communicating it. The Mission Work Products companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-work-products]) defines the provenance object that attributes an artifact without granting anything. Ingesting a work product is an added conjunctive gate at the receiving Mission's boundary: it composes with the three objects' independent gates and does not nest inside them, so Agent identity, Agent Deployment, and Mission stay a gating pipeline, not a containment hierarchy (Section 6.2). Where the separation must hold within one Mission, the metering profile's exclusivity control ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]) latches read-and-egress apart under a single approval. 12.5. The Standing-Agent Pattern The *standing-agent pattern* governs the agent whose work never ends. The agent stands; the authority cycles: the standing thing is a charter, a Mission with a consented authority ceiling and drawdown policy ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive], experimental), and the working thing is the bounded Mission each unit of work draws under it, as an in-ceiling successor or a policy- approved Child Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]), each expiring and discharging as its unit completes ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]). The progressive profile's prohibited set keeps the high-consequence classes on a fresh human approval inside the ceiling, and its Ceiling Review bounds the chain in time with an evidence-rendering renewal. Without the progressive profile the same pattern runs as ordinary, freshly approved unit Missions with deferred approval ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-approval]) absorbing the volume: the experimental profile changes the unit economics, not the governance shape. 12.6. The Mission Deployment Profile The Mission Assurance Levels (Section 11) name what to deploy, and the assurance claims (Section 11.2) name what may be proven; a claim is only checkable if a deployment states, concretely, what it enforces and what it leaves outside the boundary. The *Mission Deployment Profile* is that system-level artifact: the published composition of the per-layer statements the profiles themselves demand (the runtime profile's Enforcement Scope Statement, the harness environment statement, the MAS mapping contract, the Resource Server coverage split, the transparency-service topology and schedule, and the progressive profile's bounds and ceiling-review cadence, each where its profile is run), composed into one object an auditor, a procurement, or a security review can read. It is one artifact, not a second one: each fact's owning profile governs its meaning and normative force, and this document fixes no serialization. A machine-readable manifest schema, with stable claim identifiers and validation rules, is deferred family work; until it exists, the shapes in Appendix F are illustrative and the per-profile statements are the checkable form. Its distinguishing field is residual_risks: the profile is not credible unless it states, in the same object as its guarantees, what it does not cover. The evidence member carries the deployment's evidence-handling posture beside its guarantees: the field-classification scheme its records use, whether access to Mission evidence is itself audited, and the erasure policy that pairs retention with deletion accountability ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). The key_custody member declares, as a list keyed by key and application rather than one row per key class, the custody a deployment states for each signing key it operates: the key class (the five classes [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model] enumerates: issuer signing, evidence signing, agent sender- constraint, mediating-PEP custody, attenuation roots), the artifact classes or kid selector the entry covers (core recommends segmenting issuer signing keys by artifact class under distinct kid values within one jwks_uri, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), the holder, whether the key is exportable, its generation and signing-use controls, a reference to its documented compromise-recovery procedure, and any attestation or verifier reference for that key. software and hsm_or_kms are example holder values, a mechanism family rather than an assurance grade; this document defines neither as a normative custody-grade enum and fixes no validation rule for either. key_custody makes the trusted-base key-custody statement [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model] already requires legible in the Deployment Profile; it does not make that statement checked. Custody assurance stays open until a normative reader or verifier for this declaration exists. Two deployments that both "support Mission" but publish different Deployment Profiles provide different security properties, and the profile is what makes that difference legible. 13. Security Considerations This document defines no wire mechanism; each profile's own Security Considerations remain normative, and the consolidated trusted base and compromise analysis are the Mission Security Model's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]). What this document does introduce is composition, and the risks that emerge only at composition are its security subject matter: * stale state and materialized authority: an already-issued credential, redeemed grant, or minted attenuation root stays usable to its artifact-specific bound only where no timely state- aware or action-time gate reaches it; where one does, reliance ends at that earlier gate (Section 10.4, Section 11.5); * unmediated paths: enforcement claims hold only inside the declared PEP boundary, and the Enforcement Scope Statement's exclusions are where a compromised agent goes first; * semantic-derivation trust: the derivation boundary (Section 9.2) concentrates meaning-to-authority translation at the issuer, and the anchors commit its output, not its correctness; * component compromise: issuer, PDP, PEP, state source, and evidence producer each void a different guarantee when compromised, and the security model prices each; * context splicing and join ambiguity: independently valid identity, credential, and Mission facts compose into an unauthorized whole wherever they are combined without an authorized joining authority, verified inputs, an association policy, and conflict handling ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]); * false but correctly signed evidence: signatures make records tamper-evident, never true; and * correlation: the Mission Identifier, actor chain, and evidence joins that make audit possible are the same joins that correlate activity across audiences (Section 14). 14. Privacy Considerations The privacy properties of the Mission record and the Mission Intent are the OAuth binding's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) and each adopted profile's; this document describes them and adds no data element of its own. The OAuth binding's Privacy Considerations cover Mission Identifier correlation, token payload disclosure, and Intent retention, with the audit profile's erasure record as the transparency-side mechanism ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). The status profile's anti-oracle property bounds what its status surfaces disclose ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]). Read across profiles rather than per document, the dataflow concentrates in three places: the record and its evidence at the issuer (task prose, principals, authority, provenance); the decision and execution evidence joined on the Mission Identifier at the runtime and audit layers; and the correlation surface that identifier creates wherever it travels (tokens, status responses, evidence, receipts, the Mandate). Minimization therefore has one shape everywhere: audience-scope what each party receives, prefer audience- scoped references over content (a stable reference reused across audiences is itself a correlation surface), and let the record's access governance, not possession of a reference, decide who reads the concentrated view. The AAuth binding's privacy posture is its own ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]): the private mission blob never leaves the agent and the Person Server, the stable {approver, s256} reference is a correlation handle across every resource that sees it, and the mission log concentrates a detailed activity history at the Person Server, with the binding's minimization and retention duties applying there. 15. IANA Considerations This document makes no IANA request. 16. Informative References [A2A] A2A Project, "Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol Specification, Version 1.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-hardt-aauth-r3] Hardt, D., "AAuth Rich Resource Requests (R3)", 2026, . [I-D.draft-hardt-oauth-aauth-protocol] Hardt, D., "AAuth Protocol", Editor's copy, commit fc5e972c, 2026, . [I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-attestation-based-client-auth] Looker, T., Bastian, P., and C. Bormann, "OAuth 2.0 Attestation-Based Client Authentication", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-oauth-attestation- based-client-auth-11, 3 September 2026, . [I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-spiffe-client-auth] Schwenkschuster, A., Kasselman, P., Rose, S., Thorgersen, S., and N. Cam-Winget, "OAuth SPIFFE Client Authentication", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft- ietf-oauth-spiffe-client-auth-02, 15 June 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-aauth-mission-expiry] McGuinness, K., "AAuth Mission Expiry", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth] McGuinness, K., "Mission Context Binding for AAuth", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth-management] McGuinness, K., "AAuth Mission Management", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit] McGuinness, K., "Mission Audit Transparency", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server] McGuinness, K., "Mission Authority Server", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Bound Runtime Enforcement: AuthZEN Profile", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding] McGuinness, K., "Mission Capability Binding", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-discovery] McGuinness, K., "Mission Open-World Discovery", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-gnap] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Bound Authorization for GNAP", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Aware Agent Harnesses", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate] McGuinness, K., "Mission Mandate", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering] McGuinness, K., "Mission Consumption Metering", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-orchestration] McGuinness, K., "Mission Orchestration and Unwinding", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Bound Runtime Enforcement", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence] McGuinness, K., "Mission Runtime Evidence", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model] McGuinness, K., "Mission Security Model", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-shaping] McGuinness, K., "Mission Intent Shaping", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate] McGuinness, K., "Mission Substrate Requirements", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-uma] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Bound Authorization for UMA 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-attesters] McGuinness, K., "OAuth 2.0 Client Attester Endorsement", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-mcguinness-oauth- client-attesters-00, 28 September 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id] McGuinness, K., "Client Instance Identification for Attestation-Based Client Authentication", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-mcguinness-oauth-client- instance-id-00, 28 September 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation-assertion] McGuinness, K. and A. Parecki, "Identity Continuation Assertion for OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation- assertion-02, 8 September 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] McGuinness, K., "Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-approval] McGuinness, K., "Mission Deferred Approval for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-approved-set-verification] McGuinness, K., "Mission Approved-Set Verification for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-attenuation] McGuinness, K., "Mission Offline Attenuation for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation] McGuinness, K., "Mission Child Delegation for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence] McGuinness, K., "Mission Consent Evidence for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment] McGuinness, K., "Mission Containment for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-continuation] McGuinness, K., "Mission Continuation: Authorization Continuity for Mission-Bound Authorization", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain] McGuinness, K., "Mission Cross-Domain Projection for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-derivation-limits] McGuinness, K., "Mission Derivation Limits for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge] McGuinness, K., "Mission Completion and Entry Discharge for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion] McGuinness, K., "Mission Expansion for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant] McGuinness, K., "Mission Issuance Grant for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-management] McGuinness, K., "Mission Management for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive] McGuinness, K., "Mission Progressive Authorization for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access] McGuinness, K., "Mission Resource Access Profile for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals] McGuinness, K., "Mission Lifecycle Signals for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status] McGuinness, K., "Mission Status and Lifecycle for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list] McGuinness, K., "Mission Status List for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-submission-evidence] McGuinness, K., "Mission Intent Submission Evidence for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-transaction-authorization] McGuinness, K., "Mission Transaction Authorization Profile for OAuth 2.0", 2026, . [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-work-products] McGuinness, K., "Mission Work Products", 2026, . [I-D.draft-zehavi-oauth-rar-metadata] Zehavi, Y., "OAuth 2.0 RAR Metadata and Error Remediation", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft- zehavi-oauth-rar-metadata-06, 9 August 2026, . [I-D.draft-zhu-oauth-async-delegation] Zhu, L. and Z. Berg, "Delegated Refresh Tokens for OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-zhu-oauth-async-delegation-05, 3 August 2026, . [RFC6749] Hardt, D., Ed., "The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework", RFC 6749, DOI 10.17487/RFC6749, October 2012, . [RFC8693] Jones, M., Nadalin, A., Campbell, B., Ed., Bradley, J., and C. Mortimore, "OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange", RFC 8693, DOI 10.17487/RFC8693, January 2020, . [RFC9126] Lodderstedt, T., Campbell, B., Sakimura, N., Tonge, D., and F. Skokan, "OAuth 2.0 Pushed Authorization Requests", RFC 9126, DOI 10.17487/RFC9126, September 2021, . [RFC9396] Lodderstedt, T., Richer, J., and B. Campbell, "OAuth 2.0 Rich Authorization Requests", RFC 9396, DOI 10.17487/RFC9396, May 2023, . [RFC9943] Birkholz, H., Delignat-Lavaud, A., Fournet, C., Deshpande, Y., and S. Lasker, "An Architecture for Trustworthy and Transparent Digital Supply Chains", RFC 9943, DOI 10.17487/RFC9943, June 2026, . Appendix A. Mission Requirements The requirements the family answers are stated implementation- neutrally; each names its answering documents by short form (Appendix G). They stand on their own as a checklist, but conformance is capability- layered rather than measured by resemblance to the OAuth wire model ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]). A design provides the shared *Mission Context* capabilities when the first four properties, a compact restatement of the substrate contract's kernel ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]), hold: 1. *An approved task context*: the task is durable and explicitly approved rather than only a session or token. 2. *Stable binding and integrity*: a native reference binds the controlling authority, acting actor, and immutable approved context, or a verifiable commitment to that context, and propagation or correlation rules carry the reference across parties without conferring authority. 3. *Lifecycle gate with a reliance bound*: only an active context supports new governed decisions at the binding's declared control point, and no decision or artifact outlives both its stated bound and the transition that ends the context. 4. *Governance history*: decisions and interactions are correlated to the stable reference in an ordered audit or governance record. Two further properties are separately claimable capabilities, not one bundle: the second requires the first, and a design can hold the first alone ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]): 1. *Structured Authority*: credentials or decisions carry authority that an identified enforcement point can evaluate. 2. *Monotonic Derivation*, available only where Structured Authority holds: derived and delegated authority only narrows, and widening requires a fresh approval or a drawdown already bounded by an approved ceiling. A design provides *Runtime-Enforced Mission* capabilities when, over a State-Observable source with a stated staleness bound, two further properties hold: 1. *Per-action runtime enforcement*: consequential actions are checkable against the object at the point of use. 2. *Decision accountability, growing to a joined record*: every gated action yields Decision Evidence joined on the object's identity. What was shown requires Consent Evidence and what was done requires Execution Evidence for the covered classes; with those adopted, what was approved, shown, decided, and done is reconstructible from the join. AAuth supplies the first four natively (its expires_at member carries the reliance bound), with its lifecycle gate scoped to PS endpoints and PS-mediated paths carrying the validated reference. The OAuth binding supplies both authority capabilities as well. Runtime and portable evidence remain separately claimed capabilities; the requirements below unpack the family mechanisms without implying every binding implements every one. A.1. Context and Intent * *R1*: The task an agent pursues is a durable, structured, approved object (oauth-mission; mission-authority-server). * *R2*: The task and its derived authority are integrity-committed at approval, reproducible from the record alone (oauth-mission). * *R3*: Task proposals are untrusted input: fields the agent can influence select and narrow what derivation considers, and can request gates the issuer enforces, but never grant or widen authority by their own assertion (oauth-mission; mission-shaping). A.2. Consent and Approval * *R4*: The derived authority is disclosed to the Approver before it takes effect, and the approval covers it (oauth-mission). * *R5*: A single accountable Approver is recorded immutably on the object (oauth-mission). * *R6*: What was shown at approval is committed and reconstructible by an auditor (oauth-mission-consent-evidence). * *R7*: Approval can be asynchronous, and any in-review negotiation only narrows (oauth-mission-approval; the experimental oauth- mission-approval-revision). A.3. Lifecycle * *R8*: New reliance is gated on task state: only active permits a new governed decision, unrecognized states fail safe, and an already-issued artifact ends at its bounded residual (oauth- mission). * *R9*: Revocation is independent of credential possession, and state changes propagate by pull or push (oauth-mission; oauth- mission-status; oauth-mission-signals). * *R10*: A task can be suspended and resumed without being terminated (oauth-mission-status). * *R11*: Authority widens only through an approved successor: a fresh approval, or policy drawdown within a ceiling a human pre- consented (oauth-mission-expansion; oauth-mission-progressive). * *R12*: Authority retires per entry when the work an entry served is done (oauth-mission-discharge). A.4. Delegated, Projected, and Enforced Execution * *R13*: Derived and delegated authority only narrows (oauth- mission; oauth-mission-attenuation). * *R14*: Sub-agents receive authority by explicit delegation with lineage, fan-out control, and cascade revocation, never by session ancestry (oauth-mission-child-delegation). * *R15*: Each consequential action is checked at the point of use, the permit bound to the concrete parameters (mission-runtime; mission-authzen). * *R16*: When a task stops, governed work stops with it, and in- flight work is classified, then suppressed or cancelled where possible, compensated where authorized, or escalated; irreversible and unknown outcomes remain (mission-harness; mission- orchestration). * *R17*: Task evidence is tamper-evident and verifiable outside the deployment (mission-audit; mission-mandate). * *R18*: Two distinct cross-domain properties, never one: a Mission's authority is honorable in another trust domain without widening, through the projection grant (oauth-mission-cross- domain); and a Mission's committed facts are verifiable there without a session with the issuer, granting nothing (mission- mandate). * *R19*: Delegation history follows authorization continuity, never organizational topology. A Child Mission, an Expansion successor, or any fresh approval starts a new approval basis and actor chain; topology alone neither restarts nor extends one. Representation is profile-specific: issuer-mediated delegation nests act; holder- mediated attenuation reconstructs history from per-hop actors; and cross-domain projection carries no upstream act chain, so any destination-domain chain begins locally. Actor identity is attribution and policy input; it does not itself grant or prove authority (oauth-mission; oauth-mission-child-delegation; oauth- mission-expansion; oauth-mission-attenuation; oauth-mission-cross- domain). Appendix B. Comparison to a Conventional Stack A skeptical reading of this family asks why Rich Authorization Requests [RFC9396], short-lived tokens, and an AuthZEN PDP holding policy and session state server-side would not suffice. Steelmanned first: RAR supplies structured authorization data an Authorization Server renders into an itemized approval experience; RAR itself guarantees neither approval fidelity nor a consent UI. A short token lifetime bounds revocation only when every issuance, refresh, and exchange path re-evaluates current grant or session state; absent that discipline a fresh short token keeps issuing against stale state regardless of lifetime, the dependency the Validity Model already states (Section 10.4). AuthZEN specifies a decision API, not a global PDP, a durable session store, complete PEP placement, or a state model; a deployment supplies those properties in either design. Inside one administrative domain, a conventional stack (structured request data, an Authorization Server's consent or grant record, short credentials, and a stateful PDP) implements durable task state, fan-out joins, persistent narrowing, and audit locally. Five places mark where that local composition meets what this family standardizes: +===========+=============+=====================================+=============+ |Requirement|Conventional |Mission standardization |Illustrative | | |OAuth+PDP | |added Mission| | |realization | |cost | +===========+=============+=====================================+=============+ |Durable |OAuth grants,|An independently addressable, |Durable- | |task |refresh |lifecycle-bearing approved task with |object and | |semantics |families, or |anchors consistently interpreted by |lifecycle | |across |PDP records |the Authorization Server, PDP, |storage | |tokens and |outlive the |agents, audiences, and evidence | | |restarts |token |producers; it does not make | | | | |persistence newly possible (the OAuth| | | | |binding's Why a New Object and | | | | |Relationship to Other Authorization | | | | |Objects sections, | | | | |[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission])| | +-----------+-------------+-------------------------------------+-------------+ |Multi- |A deployment-|Stable approved-task semantics for |New claims | |credential,|invented |that join, bound to authority and |and endpoints| |multi-actor|transaction, |carried through delegation and fan- | | |join |grant, or |out outside one private PDP schema | | | |workflow |(Section 7.7) | | | |identifier | | | | |shared across| | | | |credentials | | | +-----------+-------------+-------------------------------------+-------------+ |A second |The partner |Bounded local credentials and common |State | |trust |calls the |anchors carried by Cross-Domain |consistency | |domain |origin PDP, |Projection, accepting local-token |and | | |shares state,|revocation latency (the Project |distribution;| | |or federates |verb): a portability choice, not the |privacy and | | |policy, |only possible design |correlation | | |trading | |surface | | |synchronous | | | | |coupling, | | | | |availability,| | | | |and | | | | |disclosure | | | +-----------+-------------+-------------------------------------+-------------+ |Approval as|A local |A standardized immutable snapshot, |Evidence | |a first- |consent or |integrity anchors, and one reference |operations | |class |grant |portable evidence can cite (the OAuth| | |record |database plus|binding's Why a New Object section; | | | |versioned |the Prove verb) | | | |decision logs| | | +-----------+-------------+-------------------------------------+-------------+ |Persistent |A stateful |Monotonic subset semantics across |AS or MAS | |narrowing |Authorization|issuance, delegation, attenuation, |integration; | | |Server or PDP|and cross-domain projections, |ecosystem | | |stores |auditable across components |adoption | | |reduced |(Section 8) | | | |entitlements | | | | |and consults | | | | |them at | | | | |issuance | | | +-----------+-------------+-------------------------------------+-------------+ Table 12: Where a conventional stack meets Mission standardization Past these crossovers, a conventional deployment often accumulates a durable task record, a stable join key, lifecycle checks, narrowing rules, and audit correlations. Mission standardizes that recurring shape across bindings and trust domains; it does not claim local policy systems cannot implement equivalent outcomes. Appendix C. A Worked Composition This non-normative example composes a deployment that enforces at action time from four providers, none of which is the OAuth binding, to show that the substrate contract ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]) carries the weight: an AAuth agent acts under a PS-governed Mission and calls a payment API whose authority vocabulary is owned by the resource. Four components publish provider claims: +============+=======================+=========================+ | Provider | Capability supplied | Scope | +============+=======================+=========================+ | AAuth | Contextual-governance | PS permission decisions | | Person | kernel; Lifecycle- | and PS-brokered | | Server | Gated Authorization | issuance | +------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+ | AAuth | State-Observable | The payment PDP, | | Mission | | maximum staleness five | | Management | | seconds | +------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+ | Payment | Structured Authority | Payment API actions and | | policy | | constraints under the | | adapter | | payment policy's own | | | | versioned vocabulary | +------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+ | Payment | Authorized Context | The schedule_payment | | gateway | Correlation | and release_payment | | PEP/PDP | | routes | +------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+ Table 13: Provider claims in the worked composition Action-time enforcement and decision evidence are supplied by the runtime profile and its evidence companion at the gateway ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); they consume the capability claims above as decision inputs. The AAuth rows come from the binding's own published Mission Substrate Statement: the lifecycle claim from the base Statement, and the state claim under its Mission Management activation condition, each with the Statement's temporal and failure elements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]). The payment policy adapter's and the gateway's claims remain the deployment's own, stated as deployment-local provider claims; nothing here implies every provider claim becomes binding-owned. The deployment declaration names the four providers, the two routes, and the consequence class; no machine-readable declaration format is defined (the Mission Deployment Profile's schema remains reserved future work, Section 12.6), and the declaration is ordinary deployment documentation. The deployment runs PS-asserted access. Every resource token the gateway accepts is PS-issued or PS-brokered and carries the signed mission_s256 reference, the protected propagation path; identity- based and resource-managed access are out of scope here, because those paths are not PS-gated and may ignore the reference. The gateway's join validates the carrying artifact's issuer (the Person Server), its audience (the payment API), the actor binding (the agent's key, proven on the request), and the request binding, before joining the PS evidence, the Actor proof, the request, and the adapter's output; the join is scoped to the two named routes with a lifetime no longer than the state observation's declared freshness, and a missing or conflicting input fails closed. The composition succeeds with these results and limits: +=============+============+==================================+ | Requirement | Provider | Result and material limit | +=============+============+==================================+ | Kernel | AAuth | Satisfied; native private | | | Person | Mission context and lifecycle | | | Server | | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ | Current | AAuth | Satisfied; five-second staleness | | state | Mission | within the profile's declared | | | Management | maximum | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ | Structured | Payment | Satisfied only inside the | | authority | policy | payment vocabulary; no cross- | | | adapter | resource claim | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ | Authorized | Payment | Satisfied; the gateway validates | | join | gateway | PS provenance, Actor proof, the | | | | request, and the adapter's | | | | output before joining them | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ | Action-time | Runtime | Satisfied for the two named | | enforcement | profile at | routes; direct payment-API | | | the | routes are prohibited or | | | gateway | declared uncovered | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ | Evidence | Evidence | Satisfied through the decision; | | | companion | approval-to-effect completeness | | | at the | additionally requires execution | | | gateway | evidence | +-------------+------------+----------------------------------+ Table 14: Composition result Two classifications make the example honest. The payment authority's fresh decision is decide_anew in the substrate's transition classification, never an attenuation of AAuth authority across vocabularies; and the AAuth Mission context never becomes a Rich Authorization Request object. AAuth supplies work continuity, the payment authority decides permission in its own vocabulary, and the gateway is the scoped joining and enforcement authority. The same composition fails when any of the following holds: the state source is disabled with no equivalent fresh local read; the adapter publishes descriptive strings rather than machine-evaluable semantics; the gateway accepts a Mission reference from the agent without validated provenance (context splicing); the state source's staleness exceeds the declared maximum; a direct route bypasses the gateway; the gateway accepts the reference on an identity-based or resource-managed request; or the payment-vocabulary claim is generalized to another resource's vocabulary. Appendix D. Error Surfaces The OAuth and MAS profiles use three error surfaces, each owned once. OAuth endpoints return OAuth error codes, owned by the OAuth binding ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Lifecycle surfaces, including management, return the status profile's JSON error body (error, error_description, nonce) ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-management]). MAS-native surfaces return the MAS error object, which adds error_reason and omits the nonce ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]). AuthZEN denial reasons are not a fourth surface: they ride the decision response ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]). Where the same symbol exists as both an OAuth error code and a wire-body symbol (invalid_request), the envelope it arrives in disambiguates. The AAuth binding retains AAuth's own error surface. Its native management companion returns application/problem+json, preserves the base AAuth mission_terminated error on ordinary PS operations, and makes an absent reference indistinguishable from one the caller is not authorized to observe ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth-management]). Registration posture is likewise deliberate per artifact class: OAuth-facing parameters and media types register with IANA, evidence media types defer registration until cross-domain interoperability demands it, and each profile states which posture it takes. Appendix E. Illustrative Verification Guidance These scenarios illustrate how a Baseline Issuance deployment can be checked. Each checks a rule its home document states normatively; this document owns none of them and confers no conformance class. Coverage is scoped by the capabilities a binding's Mission Substrate Statement claims (the OAuth binding, which publishes no Statement, is covered through its own Conformance gates), so a standalone MAS is never asked to verify a credential behavior it does not claim; the family's conformance manifest carries the profile-owned rows. Kernel, every Baseline deployment (the substrate contract's approval event, governance gate, and bounded reliance, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]): 1. approval creates an active Mission; 2. an authenticated terminal transition takes effect in the Controller's own subsequent decisions; and 3. the observed residual after a transition does not exceed the published reliance bound. Expiry ceiling, where the binding imposes one (the OAuth binding's Mission-Bound Access Tokens section, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]; the UMA and GNAP bindings, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-uma], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-gnap]; for AAuth, the expiry profile, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-aauth-mission-expiry]; and for the standalone MAS, the issuance grant's Lifetime rule, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]): 1. no credential outlives the Mission's effective expiry. Credential-Bound, where claimed (the substrate contract's Credential- Bound capability): 1. a credential from another Mission cannot be substituted (the reference and its Controller namespace bind together). Lifecycle-Gated Authorization, where claimed and limited to the operations named in the claim (the substrate contract's Lifecycle- Gated Authorization capability): 1. an active Mission yields a positive result for a claimed operation within policy; 2. a terminal transition prevents every claimed operation; and 3. for every lifecycle-gated operation in the claimed scope, unavailable, invalid, stale, or unknown state prevents a positive result (the forward-compatibility rule: only active permits reliance, and lost state never fails open). For the OAuth binding, the same coverage includes (the OAuth binding's Mission Lifecycle and Gating and grant-binding rules, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]): 1. refresh while the Mission is active succeeds within policy and is refused after a terminal transition; and 2. a bare client-supplied Mission identifier creates no binding: the grant, never the identifier, determines the Mission. Appendix F. Deployment Profile Example Shapes These shapes are illustrative. This document fixes no serialization, and each fact's owning profile governs its meaning (Section 12.6). An illustrative shape, for a deployment that runs mediated credential custody but makes neither High-Assurance claim: the agent-compromise- resistant claim requires the runtime profile's per-condition evidence bindings (EAT profile and claim identifiers, measurements, appraisal policy, attester identity, freshness, signed approval configuration, rendering evidence, and a path-completeness audit), and this shape's generic attestation reference is declaration input, not that proof. The key_custody entries below are declarations under the same rule: a custody statement made legible, not a checked assurance grade (the member's definition in Section 12.6 states the open verifier gap): { "profile": "mission-governed-agent-runtime", "assurance_claims": [ "action-time enforcement", "parameter-bound enforcement", "bounded revocation latency" ], "mission_issuer": "https://as.example.com", "state_sources": [ { "type": "status_endpoint", "max_staleness_seconds": 30 } ], "issuance": { "binding": "oauth-core", "mission_claim_required": true, "refresh_gated_on_active_state": true }, "runtime": { "pdp": "authzen", "pep_locations": ["tool-gateway", "browser-action-proxy"], "mediated_action_classes": [ "irreversible_action", "external_commitment", "privileged_administration" ], "action_bound_approval_classes": [ "irreversible_action", "external_commitment", "privileged_administration" ], "unmediated_exclusions": [ "internal_reasoning", "local_cache_read" ] }, "credential_custody": { "held_by": "pep", "sender_constrained": true, "key_generated_in_pep": true, "agent_receives_bearer_token": false }, "key_custody": [ { "key_class": "issuer_signing", "artifact_classes": ["mission_tokens"], "kid_selector": "issuer-token-2026", "holder": "hsm_or_kms", "exportable": false, "generation": "dual_controlled", "signing_use_controls": "online_token_signing", "compromise_recovery_ref": "https://ops.example.com/procedures/issuer-key-compromise" }, { "key_class": "issuer_signing", "artifact_classes": ["registered_evidence", "portable_artifacts"], "kid_selector": "issuer-evidence-2026", "holder": "hsm_or_kms", "exportable": false, "generation": "dual_controlled", "signing_use_controls": "low_volume_high_value_signing", "compromise_recovery_ref": "https://ops.example.com/procedures/issuer-key-compromise" }, { "key_class": "mediating_pep_custody", "artifact_classes": ["sender_constraint_proof"], "kid_selector": "pep-dpop-2026", "holder": "software", "exportable": false, "generation": "generated_in_pep", "signing_use_controls": "per_session_sender_constraint", "compromise_recovery_ref": "https://ops.example.com/procedures/pep-key-rotation", "attestation_ref": "https://attest.example.com/pep/2026" } ], "approval_rendering": { "rendered_by": "agent-isolated-component" }, "execution_environment": { "attestation_ref": "https://attest.example.com/runtime/2026" }, "harness": { "subagent_inheritance": "explicit_delegation_only", "resume_requires_active_state": true, "cached_credentials_revalidated": true, "secondary_egress_enumerated": true }, "exposure": { "taint_rule": "enforced", "egress_channels_enumerated": true, "egress_mediated": true }, "standing_charters": { "ceiling_review_cadence_days": 90, "per_drawdown_bound": "single_entry_delta", "drawdown_rate_bound_per_chain_per_hour": 60 }, "resource_servers": { "authorization_details_enforcing": ["https://erp.example.com"], "scope_projection_only": ["https://mail.example.com"], "constraint_enforcement_for_scope_only": "runtime_pep" }, "evidence": { "decision_evidence": true, "execution_evidence": true, "retention_days": 365, "field_classification": "evidence-schema-v2", "evidence_access_audited": true, "erasure_policy": "erasure-records", "transparency": { "service_operator": "third_party", "monitor": "sec-ops", "registration_time_bound_seconds": 3600 } }, "residual_risks": [ "mediated custody is declared, not evidenced: no High-Assurance claim is made", "unmediated local reasoning is outside enforcement", "revocation latency up to 30 seconds", "PEP compromise is not prevented", "per-entry constraints reach scope-only resources only via the PEP", "long-term memory and provider model context are not Mission-scoped exposure points" ] } An issuance-only deployment (Section 12.2) publishes a smaller shape: no runtime, credential_custody, or harness member, its token lifetime stated as the revocation bound where a Resource Server does not introspect, and residuals that name the per-action check it does not run: { "profile": "mission-issuance-only", "assurance_claims": [ "approved-record integrity", "bounded revocation latency" ], "mission_issuer": "https://as.example.com", "state_sources": [ { "type": "introspection", "max_staleness_seconds": 0 } ], "issuance": { "binding": "oauth-core", "refresh_gated_on_active_state": true, "max_access_token_lifetime_seconds": 300 }, "resource_servers": { "authorization_details_enforcing": ["https://erp.example.com"], "scope_projection_only": ["https://mail.example.com"], "constraint_enforcement_for_scope_only": "refuse_issuance" }, "residual_risks": [ "no per-action check within a token lifetime", "revocation up to 300 seconds where no introspection", "scope-only constraints not projectable are refused", "delegated tokens reach Mission-aware resources only" ] } Appendix G. Mission Document Map One row per document, grouped as the family groups them; the short form drops the draft-mcguinness- prefix, and the repository's DRAFTS.md is the full catalog with maturity and adoption metadata. The naming encodes a boundary: profiles extending the Authorization Server's own surfaces keep "oauth" in their names; profiles defined against the substrate of Section 10 are named without it. This document is named without it because the architecture is substrate- neutral by construction. Maturity is a dependency boundary. A Standards-Track profile never depends normatively on an experimental one: the experimental profiles extend the stable interface only through its declared seams, the Mission Intent extension seam of the OAuth binding (a named, companion-defined top-level member) and the coordinated-extension rules of the evidence objects, and a Standards-Track document cites them informatively at most. An experimental profile that stabilizes crosses the boundary by reclassification, not by a stable document absorbing a dependency. Within Lifecycle, Status is the OAuth lifecycle suite's root document, with Signals (the push channel) and Management (the operator plane) as its satellites; AAuth keeps its native two-state lifecycle, served by mission-aauth-management, with the expiry bound profiled by aauth-mission-expiry. *Architecture mappings:* +=============+==========================================+ | Document | Role | +=============+==========================================+ | mission-aam | Experimental sketch. Cloudflare's Agent | | | Access Model mapped onto the family; | | | defines no binding or mechanism. | +-------------+------------------------------------------+ Table 15 *The substrate and the bindings:* +===============================+=================================+ | Document | Role | +===============================+=================================+ | oauth-mission | The OAuth binding: approval, | | | anchors, the mission claim, the | | | subset rule, and state-gated | | | issuance. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | oauth-mission-resource-access | The mission_resource_access | | | type: matching, Common | | | Constraints, delegation policy, | | | and subset algebra. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | mission-authority-server | The standalone Mission Issuer | | | and the PDP join of ordinary | | | credentials to Missions. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | oauth-mission-issuance-grant | The issuance join: MAS-minted | | | grants an Authorization Server | | | redeems for Mission-bound, | | | state-gated tokens. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | mission-aauth | The AAuth binding: Person | | | Server control, the | | | s256-committed mission blob, | | | and PS-path gating. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | mission-uma | Experimental sketch. The UMA | | | 2.0 binding: Intent by claims | | | pushing, the RPT as Mission- | | | bound credential. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | mission-gnap | Experimental sketch. The GNAP | | | binding: Intent in the grant | | | request; drawdown or expansion | | | on modification. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | mission-substrate | The binding-neutral kernel | | | contract, normative on any | | | further binding; bindings other | | | than OAuth publish Statements. | +-------------------------------+---------------------------------+ Table 16 *Approval time:* +===================================+=============================+ | Document | Role | +===================================+=============================+ | mission-shaping | Client-side shaping of a | | | user's request into a | | | candidate Mission Intent, | | | as untrusted proposal. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-submission-evidence | The Intent Submission | | | Evidence framework: entry | | | convention, binding, and | | | verification bounds; | | | defines no types. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-consent-evidence | The consent_rendering_hash | | | anchor and signed evidence | | | of what the Approver was | | | shown. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-approval | Asynchronous approval over | | | the deferred substrate. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | mission-approval-governance | The Approval Governance | | | Record: authenticated | | | assertions behind an | | | approval, committed | | | atomically with activation. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-approval-revision | Experimental: in-review | | | narrowing revision of a | | | deferred proposal. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-template | Experimental: one consent | | | to a template's ceiling; | | | each dispatch is an | | | ordinary, policy- | | | instantiated Mission. | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------+ Table 17 *Lifecycle:* +=================================+============================+ | Document | Role | +=================================+============================+ | oauth-mission-status | The signed pull surface | | | and lifecycle endpoint, | | | with suspended and | | | completed. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-status-list | A signed, compressed | | | Status List read locally | | | per action instead of per- | | | Mission status reads. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-discharge | Per-entry discharge via | | | terminal_when, an | | | extension operation on the | | | Status lifecycle endpoint. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-signals | A signed event per | | | lifecycle transition, push | | | or poll. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | mission-control-plane | Experimental: issuer | | | consistency, durable | | | transition publication, | | | rollback resistance, and | | | the availability boundary. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-expansion | Widening through an | | | approved successor | | | Mission. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-containment | Event-triggered monotonic | | | narrowing of a live | | | Mission's effective | | | authority; restoration | | | only by successor. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-derivation-limits | An issuer-enforced cap on | | | derivations under one | | | Mission, refused at | | | issuance once reached. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-progressive | Experimental: policy- | | | adjudicated expansion | | | within a pre-consented | | | ceiling. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | mission-discovery | Experimental: the open- | | | world encounter as a | | | governed operation, with | | | identity pinning and | | | adjudication floors. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-management | Fleet enumeration and bulk | | | lifecycle operations for | | | operators; dry-run-first, | | | per-Mission semantics. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | mission-aauth-management | AAuth-native status, | | | termination, optional | | | expiry, and delegation- | | | tree queries at the Person | | | Server. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ | aauth-mission-expiry | Profile of AAuth's | | | expires_at lifetime bound: | | | precision, skew | | | documentation, prompt | | | termination. | +---------------------------------+----------------------------+ Table 18 *Cross-domain projection and continuity:* +====================================+=============================+ | Document | Role | +====================================+=============================+ | oauth-mission-cross-domain | Single-hop projection of a | | | Mission to another trust | | | domain via the cross-domain | | | grant. | +------------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-cross-org-delegation | Recursive cross- | | | organizational delegation | | | as offline attenuation; | | | projection turns a verified | | | chain into a local token. | +------------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-mission-continuation | Authorization continuity | | | over identity-continuity | | | transports, state-gated; a | | | continuation handle grants | | | nothing. | +------------------------------------+-----------------------------+ | oauth-id-continuation-assertion | A continuation transport: a | | | short-lived subject token | | | yielding an ID-JAG for one | | | hop. | +------------------------------------+-----------------------------+ Table 19 *Runtime enforcement:* +=========================================+=========================+ | Document | Role | +=========================================+=========================+ | mission-runtime | The per-action | | | decision contract: | | | parameter binding, | | | custody, fail-closed | | | behavior; binding- | | | neutral. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | mission-runtime-oauth | The OAuth 2.0 | | | realization of the | | | runtime contract: | | | token validation and | | | claim and authority | | | mappings. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | mission-authzen | The AuthZEN profile: | | | the decision-API | | | request and response | | | mapping and the | | | denial | | | classification. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | mission-runtime-evidence | Decision Evidence, | | | Execution Evidence, | | | and Refusal Records: | | | their integrity | | | envelope and | | | retention. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | mission-metering | Experimental: | | | cumulative | | | consumption bounds | | | and the metering | | | that enforces them. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ | oauth-mission-transaction-authorization | Experimental: a | | | single-use action- | | | bound token minted | | | after a fresh cross- | | | domain decision. | +-----------------------------------------+-------------------------+ Table 20 *Agent runtime:* +============================+===================================+ | Document | Role | +============================+===================================+ | mission-harness | Binding sessions, queues, and | | | sub-agent handles to Mission | | | state; the mediated environment. | +----------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | mission-capability-binding | Binds a catalog-sourced entry (an | | | MCP tool or OpenAPI operation) to | | | its source; refuses drift. | +----------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | mission-orchestration | Experimental: reversibility | | | classes, unwind plans, and | | | compensation after a stop. | +----------------------------+-----------------------------------+ Table 21 *Sub-agents:* +================================+================================+ | Document | Role | +================================+================================+ | oauth-mission-child-delegation | Child Missions with lineage, | | | strict-subset authority, | | | cascade revocation. | +--------------------------------+--------------------------------+ | oauth-mission-attenuation | Experimental: narrower | | | Mission-bound tokens minted | | | offline; the kill switch | | | preserved by runtime re-check. | +--------------------------------+--------------------------------+ Table 22 *Proof and portability:* +=========================================+========================+ | Document | Role | +=========================================+========================+ | oauth-mission-approved-set-verification | An independent check | | | that carried authority | | | is a subset of the | | | complete approved | | | Authority Set. | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+ | mission-mandate | A signed, portable | | | statement of a | | | Mission's committed | | | facts; evidence, not a | | | credential. | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+ | mission-audit | Registration of | | | Mission evidence in a | | | SCITT Transparency | | | Service; receipts | | | verifiable offline. | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+ | mission-evidence-envelope | Experimental: a | | | binding-neutral | | | evidence envelope and | | | payload-type registry | | | for future evidence | | | kinds. | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+ Table 23 *Security model:* +=============================+===============================+ | Document | Role | +=============================+===============================+ | oauth-mission-work-products | Experimental: work-product | | | provenance and non-transitive | | | handoff; a work product is | | | input, not authority. | +-----------------------------+-------------------------------+ | mission-security-model | The trusted base in one view: | | | what each component must | | | achieve and what its | | | compromise costs. | +-----------------------------+-------------------------------+ Table 24 Appendix H. Document History [[ To be removed from the final specification ]] * Reading order and section ownership, with no change to any profile's requirements. A Mission's Life leads the model; Meaning and Derivation gathers the ontology contract, the derivation boundary, and approval fidelity; the binding comparison, now with GNAP, sits with the substrate; Assurance opens with a table of the frames it uses and folds the reference stacks into the levels; and each deployment pattern has its own subsection. Requirements, the conventional-stack comparison, the worked composition, error surfaces, illustrative verification guidance, the Deployment Profile shapes, and the trimmed document map are appendices. The verb spine carries an overlay of owning documents and packages. Repeated explanations have one home, and a repetition that qualifies a guarantee keeps a short local summary. The model is stated binding-neutrally, with each realization labeled, and the Runtime-Enforced bundle's dependencies are described by intended category, not maturity. * Editorial corrections, with no change to any profile's requirements. The capability-kill property is stated per action class and consumer rather than per assurance level, matching the composition section and the containment profile. The four Mission Issuer bindings are named, and GNAP joins the Mission Issuer roles, the control-point peer row, and the credential-carried pattern. The worked composition names no level. The AAuth protocol and R3 are cited, and AAuth terms are expanded on first use. Terms owned elsewhere point to their owners. "Mission- bound" names one definition. Keywords describing other documents' rules are lowercased, and temporal phrasing is removed. The agent-identity section is retitled, the binding-property summary covers the whole vector, and the AuthZEN companion is called the AuthZEN profile. The Stop step of A Mission's Life separates what ends at once from what ends within a staleness bound or at a token's own expiry. * The issuance-only deployment is named under Entry Ramps by Estate with its invariants, introspection cutoff, claims, and runtime triggers; the adoption-ladder table grants Baseline Issuance the reads and writes whose bounds the receiving Resource Server enforces; and the Deployment Profile gains an issuance-only example shape. * Client-instance references follow their successors: draft- mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-assertion is replaced by {I- D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-id} and [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-attesters], and the deprecated draft-mcguinness-oauth-ai-agent-instance is no longer cited. Instance identity is a client-instance attestation and validated Instance Context, attribution needs an instance-unique key, and instance evidence identifies no actor. No requirement changed. * Linked the OAuth binding's informative derivation-policy appendix from the authority derivation boundary (#309). * Added the optional Control-Plane Consistency companion to the document map (#250). * Controls taxonomy retirement (#636): the swarm-execution discussion no longer claims derivation_limit (renamed from max_derivations) is a fan-out or concurrency ceiling; it counts issuance events, not instances, and one instance refreshing repeatedly exhausts it exactly as N instances deriving once each would. The Agent Deployment pin is now described as a named architectural pattern with no wire member the OAuth binding currently defines, pointing to a forward-referenced Agent Deployment Binding profile instead of the retired controls.agent_deployment. References to the OAuth binding's retired controls extension seam updated to the Mission Intent's own (open, named-member) extension seam. * PR #717 review fix: precised the "Mission-bound" definition text (Section 10.2 and Section 11.3) so it no longer requires a Mission Substrate Statement of a binding that deliberately publishes none. A binding that claims substrate conformance evidences credential- mission-bound through its own Statement; the OAuth binding, which claims no substrate conformance and publishes no Statement, is instead assessed through its own informative Mapping Assessment and discharges the definition directly through its own Conformance gates. No normative content changed. * Reworded the blanket "the bindings are peers of one another" sentence in the Introduction to name two independent axes, deployment topology and data-model independence, and to classify the Mission Authority Server as a normative standalone-controller protocol binding over the OAuth Mission data model: a peer deployment topology, but not an independent substrate model (#704). Cross-referenced the three previously uncross-referenced accounts of what earns "Mission-bound" (Section 10.2 and Section 11.3, and the OAuth binding's Conformance gates): Section 11.3's credential-mission-bound equivalence is now the stated definition, a binding's Mission Substrate Statement is how it evidences the properties, and the OAuth binding's gates are its discharge of the definition (#663). No normative content, anchor, or table row changed. * Cross-referenced the three previously separate accounts of what earns the "Mission-bound" term: Section 10.2 now names the Mission Binding Properties vector's credential-mission-bound property (Section 11.3) as the definition. Its six conditions are each mapped to the Statement capability or OAuth binding surface that discharges it, condition 2 (Mission identity) no longer names a token-carried authority_hash, aligning with the ruled minimal- claim direction of #702, and condition 6 (the auditable derivation link) names the OAuth binding's retained Mission Record explicitly rather than asserting an unspecified discharge (#663). * Non-goal reworded (#637): "a new authority format, or a new grant protocol" narrowed to "a new grant protocol," naming the OAuth binding's Mission Resource Access Profile as the family's one cross-resource authorization_details type, since RFC 9396 leaves type semantics to the type and the family now defines one. Document Map gains the profile's row under "The substrate and the bindings." * Editorial density pass on this Informational document: the aggregate-ceiling and artifact-plane (non-transitive work-product) composition readings under Section 8 tightened to a summary sentence plus citation each, with their "not this summary, is the normative text this passage tracks" deferral kept; several over- long paragraphs in Section 4.1, Section 10.4, Section 11, and Section 11.4 split for one idea per paragraph and front-loaded openers. No normative content, anchor, or table row changed. Acknowledgments This document is part of the Mission-Bound Authorization work and maps the structure that its profiles establish individually. Author's Address Karl McGuinness Independent Email: public@karlmcguinness.com