| Internet-Draft | Mission Runtime | August 2026 |
| McGuinness | Expires 22 February 2027 | [Page] |
This document specifies runtime enforcement for Mission-Bound Authorization: within a declared enforcement scope, no consequential action executes until a policy enforcement point obtains a permit from a policy decision point that evaluates the action and its concrete parameters against the Mission established for the acting credential. The evaluation checks the Mission's approved authority and constraints, the actor context from the delegation chain, the Mission's current state, and the applicable Resource policy. The companion issuance profile binds issued authority to a durable, approved Mission but governs issuance and derivation only; without a point-of-use check, an active Mission becomes ambient authority for the actions an agent takes within a token's lifetime. This document is that check. It defines where enforcement sits, how a permit is bound to concrete parameters to close the time-of-check to time-of-use gap, the materialized policy view a decision evaluates against, the fail-closed posture for constraints and consumption bounds, and the runtime evidence every decision and refusal path produces. For the high-consequence classes it further defines action-bound approval, credential custody in the mediating enforcement point rather than the agent, and two named enforcement claims with individually verifiable conditions: agent-compromise-resistant enforcement and trifecta containment.¶
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-runtime.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/mcguinness/mission-bound-authorization.¶
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/.¶
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 22 February 2027.¶
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.¶
Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (the "issuance profile") makes a Mission a first-class OAuth artifact: a structured, human-approved, integrity-bound task whose authority bounds and outlives every token an agent derives. It is deliberately an issuance-and-derivation layer: it governs what authority may exist, not what an agent does with it. Within a token's lifetime the agent exercises the issued authority freely, so a Mission that is never consulted at the point of use functions as ambient authority for every consequential action inside its envelope.¶
This document is the runtime layer that closes that gap: the enforcement half of the model, and the profile that makes a Mission-bound token more than governance metadata. Its substance is one contract, stated once here and elaborated by the rest of the document.¶
Within a declared enforcement scope, a consequential action executes only after a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) at the action's last controllable boundary obtains, from a Policy Decision Point (PDP), a permit that evaluates the action and its concrete parameters against the established Mission: its approved authority and constraints, the actor context from the delegation chain, its current lifecycle state, and the applicable Resource policy. The permit is bound to the parameters the action executes with, and every decision and refusal path leaves evidence.¶
Mission-bound tokens bound what authority may exist; the contract
fixes where and how that authority is re-checked before
consequential effects occur. The order is the point: approve the
bounded work, then authorize every consequential action against
that approved boundary. Per-action authorization alone cannot
prevent individually permitted steps from composing into an outcome
no one approved; the approved boundary bounds composition, with the
cumulative bounds and exclusive latch of the metering companion
where deployed (Section 9,
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]). The PEP is whatever component can
actually prevent the action: a Resource Server, an MCP server, an
egress proxy, a workflow engine, or the orchestrator itself
(Section 4.5). The PDP's placement is a deployment choice
(Section 7). A deployment whose acting tokens carry no mission
claim can still bind each decision to a Mission: the Mission
Substrate (Section 3) admits an externally established
Mission reference (Section 7.3).¶
Seven invariants restate the contract as the properties a conforming deployment maintains. Each is normative in its home section, and the failure-mode table (Section 10) is their operational form.¶
No consequential action executes without a prior PDP permit; token possession alone never suffices (Section 7).¶
The PEP sits where the action can still be stopped; a check further upstream does not survive what happens after it (Section 4.5).¶
A parameter-bound permit binds the normalized parameters, and the executing PEP reverifies them immediately before acting; a changed parameter is a refused action (Section 8).¶
A permit requires the Mission active within a published
staleness bound, and the high-consequence classes require an
active freshness source, not token-lifetime expiry
(Section 7.4).¶
An unknown or unmetered constraint, an unreachable PDP, Mission state that cannot be established within the staleness bound, or an unsupported authorization-details type refuses the action (Section 10).¶
Every decision and every refusal path produces an integrity-protected record, and a high-consequence action also produces execution-outcome evidence (Section 11).¶
No runtime input expands authority beyond the issued Authority Set; a deny is terminal for the attempted action, and widening is a governance operation, never a runtime one (Section 7).¶
For the high-consequence classes (Section 4.3) the profile goes further: action-bound approval re-consents the concrete parameters (Section 4.4), and mediated custody keeps the credential's sender-constraint key in the enforcing component rather than the agent (Section 4.6). Those mechanisms compose into the two named claims of Section 12, agent-compromise-resistant enforcement and trifecta containment: the bar a deployment meets before representing itself as resistant to a compromised or injected agent, and the High-Assurance Agent level of the Mission Assurance Levels ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]).¶
This profile specifies enforcement invariants, not a wire protocol: it does not standardize a PDP decision API, an enforcement-scope discovery format, a Mission Status endpoint, or a portable audit receipt. It defines what a deployment MUST satisfy when it claims runtime Mission enforcement; the surfaces it deliberately leaves to deployments or future work are collected in Section 16.¶
Because the invariants are not a wire format, two conforming deployments do not thereby interoperate at the PEP-PDP boundary; the interoperable wire surface is supplied by a separately specified decision API binding (Section 15), the AuthZEN binding being [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]. That a wire format is a deployment choice does not make it an ad hoc one: the Runtime-Enforced level of the Mission Assurance Levels ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]) requires a specified decision-API binding, of which the AuthZEN profile is the one this family defines; a deployment that uses a different decision API specifies that binding likewise (Section 15). This document is the architecture and invariant layer; the binding is the interoperability layer.¶
The seam between the two documents is exact. This document delivers the four things the issuance profile names as out of scope, plus enforcement of the constraints that profile carries but does not evaluate:¶
evaluation of a request's parameters against the Mission at the point of use (Section 7, Section 8);¶
per-action runtime enforcement evidence (Section 11);¶
binding of the invoked tool or function identity to the Mission's approved authority (Section 7);¶
execution-time re-evaluation that closes the approval-to-execution (time-of-check to time-of-use) gap (Section 8);¶
and, additionally, the fail-closed treatment of consumption bounds (Section 9).¶
This document depends normatively on the issuance profile and is not implementable alone: it consumes the Mission-bound access tokens that profile defines, or access tokens joined to an externally established Mission under Section 7.3. It does not place any new requirement back on the issuance profile; it reads only fields that profile already defines:¶
the mission claim (id, issuer, authority_hash);¶
the token's authorization_details, including entries of type
mission_resource_access (resource, actions, constraints,
and any delegation member) and any other entry type the deployment
supports under the issuance profile's rules;¶
the act chain, when delegation is in effect;¶
the standard iss, aud, sub, client_id, and exp claims, when
present in the token format; and¶
any cnf sender-constraint binding.¶
Where this document needs a value the token does not carry (the current Mission lifecycle state, or a materialized policy-view version), it obtains it at runtime as described below, never by requiring the issuance profile to add a field.¶
The Resource Server enforcement rules in the issuance profile remain the baseline for every Mission-bound access token. This document adds an optional runtime conformance profile for deployments that claim execution-time Mission enforcement; it does not weaken the issuance profile's stateless token-validation, subset, delegation, or constraint-enforcement requirements.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
This specification uses the terms "access token", "Authorization
Server", "client", "protected resource", "resource owner", and
"Resource Server" from OAuth 2.0 [RFC6749] through the terminology
incorporated by [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]. It also uses
the Mission, Mission Intent, Mission Issuer, Authority Set,
Approver, delegation, and mission claim terminology from
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], and Effective Authority Set
and discharge from [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status].¶
The component that can prevent a consequential action and that obtains and enforces a decision before the action runs. Depending on the action this is a Resource Server, an MCP server, an egress proxy, a workflow engine, or the orchestrator itself.¶
The component that evaluates a consequential action against the Mission and returns permit or deny. Its placement is a deployment choice (Section 7).¶
Local policy of the Resource Server or protected resource, including object-level authorization, tenant configuration, legal holds, service invariants, and risk decisions. Mission authority is an upper bound and does not override Resource policy.¶
An action that has external visibility or effect and so MUST be evaluated before it runs (Section 4.3).¶
The irreversible action, external commitment, and privileged administration classes, to which this profile's strictest requirements attach (Section 4.3).¶
A PDP's permit-or-deny result for one action, bound to the inputs it evaluated (Section 7).¶
The single Mission a decision is evaluated against, established
from the credential's mission claim or externally
(Section 7.3).¶
A deployment-opaque identifier the PDP emits for the materialized
policy and Mission view it evaluated against, so a permit and its
evidence record tie to a reproducible decision basis. It need not
reveal policy content; it is a correlator that lets an operator
determine which materialized policy, Mission state view, and
constraint interpretation a decision used. It is local to
the runtime layer and is distinct from the issuance profile's
policy_version Mission-record field
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); this document does not
interpret it beyond correlation, and defines no portable policy-version
registry. The materialized policy view and its content-addressed
policy_view_id are defined in Section 7.5.¶
The record a consequential action produces for a PDP decision or a PEP refusal path (Section 11).¶
The set of resources, action classes, execution paths, PEP placements, supported authorization details, state sources, and evidence mechanisms for which a deployment claims conformance to this profile.¶
The per-operation statement of normalization and binding rules a deployment publishes; defined in full in Section 8.¶
A deployment's Resource Server-facing conformance statement for this profile. It defines which protected resources and operations the Resource Server enforces, where the PEP sits, how local Resource policy composes with Mission authority, and which Operation Profiles apply.¶
A deployment-trusted source from which the PDP establishes the Mission lifecycle state or the freshness of that state (Section 7.4).¶
An access token issued under a Mission per
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], carrying
authorization_details and a mission claim.¶
This profile is defined against the Mission model rather than against OAuth 2.0 mechanics: it is a substrate-neutral consumer, and this section is its consumption declaration under the rule of Mission Substrate Requirements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]) that a substrate-neutral profile declare the kernel functions and optional capabilities it consumes.¶
From the contextual-governance kernel it consumes the Mission
identifier and issuer, the kernel's Mission Reference and Controller;
the lifecycle state space with its only-active-permits rule, the
kernel's governance gate; the immutable Approved Context, the
approval-time fixity behind every anchor its records cite; and the
Mission's audit horizon, which bounds the ordered governance record.
The kernel requires no particular integrity anchors: intent_hash
and authority_hash are the OAuth binding's commitment to the
Approved Context, supplied by the issuance profile, not by the
kernel.¶
It consumes these optional capabilities:¶
| Capability | Consumption | Scope of consumption |
|---|---|---|
| Structured Authority | required | The decision contract materializes and evaluates the effective Authority Set, with its subset rule and Common Constraints (Section 7.2.1, Section 7.5); as the substrate's composition rule warns, a Mission reference alone is not structured authority |
| Lifecycle-Gated Authorization | required | Every Runtime Decision gates on the only-active-permits rule (Section 7) |
| State-Observable | conditional | An authenticated freshness source with a stated staleness bound, consumed wherever an enforcement scope's published staleness bound is tighter than the credential lifetime (Section 7.4) |
| Monotonic Derivation | conditional | Consumed where delegation, attenuation, or containment narrowing is enforced at action time through effective-set evaluation (Section 7.2.1) |
| Credential-Bound | conditional | Consumed when the binding provides the Mission-bound credential carrying the mission claim; a binding that does not provide it supplies an externally established Mission reference instead, under the binding-establishment step of Section 7.3
|
| Independently Verifiable | not consumed | Offline verification is the audit profile's concern ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]); the runtime evidence companion defines the records and their scoped verification ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]) |
| Portable Evidence | not consumed | Evidence portability is the audit profile's concern ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]); the records themselves are the runtime evidence companion's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]) |
The OAuth binding [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (the issuance profile to its OAuth companions) is this version's reference host: a normative reference for its concrete OAuth surfaces, not the family's substrate (the substrate contract is [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]). It defines each consumed kernel function and capability for OAuth 2.0, and every OAuth artifact named in this document enters through it. A binding that provides the required capabilities above, and whichever conditional capabilities the deployment's enforcement scopes require, can host this profile, given a mapping of this profile's representations onto the binding's own: the authority representation the decision contract evaluates and the Approved Context commitment its records cite. Such a binding is defined by that substrate, not here, and its Mission Substrate Statement declares what it provides (the AAuth binding [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth] is one example). A binding that does not provide Structured Authority does not host this profile's decision contract; it composes through its own native authorization gate and the externally established Mission reference of Section 7.3. The portability claim is capability-scoped rather than substrate-wide for the reason the substrate's Capability Confusion consideration states: every property this profile requires matches an explicit capability claim and its scope, never the generic statement that a binding supports Missions.¶
Agent PEP (action boundary) PDP | | | |- action+params ->| | | | validate token | | |- evaluate vs Mission ->| | | (authority, params, | | | actor, state) | | |<---- permit / deny ----| | | bind to params; | | | write evidence | |<- execute/refuse-| |¶
The PEP first validates the token as described in Section 6. On permit the PEP reverifies the parameter binding, then executes; on deny it refuses. The inputs the decision evaluates are defined in Section 7.¶
This profile is implemented by a runtime deployment, not by an OAuth Authorization Server alone. Three things conform, at different granularities: the runtime deployment (this section), the Resource Server runtime profile for OAuth-protected resources (Section 5), and the PEP/PDP decision path for each consequential action (Section 7). Conformance is not global to a product, Authorization Server, Resource Server, or PDP: a deployment conforms to this profile only for the resources, action classes, execution paths, and authorization-detail types named in its enforcement scope.¶
A deployment that claims conformance to this profile MUST publish an Enforcement Scope Statement: the structured, referenceable declaration of its enforcement scope that auditors, procurement, and interop tests key on. This statement is what earns the Runtime-Enforced level of the Mission Assurance Levels, and it feeds the Mission Deployment Profile, the deployment-level manifest the architecture defines ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]). It MUST include:¶
the protected resources, action classes, and execution paths it mediates, and the Mission-establishment mode each enforcement scope uses;¶
the PEP locations that can prevent those actions, and the unmediated paths explicitly excluded from the claim (the harness profile's execution-environment scope statement supplies these for a harness-run deployment, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]);¶
the credential custody mode for each mediated class (mediated custody in the PEP, or agent-held, Section 4.6);¶
the conformance tier claimed for each mediated action class: the core enforcement tier, or the transaction-assurance tier where claimed or required (the tier vocabulary below);¶
the PDP or PDPs that evaluate Mission-bound decisions;¶
the authorization_details types, action identifiers, and constraint
vocabularies it supports;¶
any Resource Server runtime profile and Operation Profiles it uses (Section 5);¶
the Mission state source and maximum staleness bound used for each action class (Section 7.4);¶
the PDP-unavailability posture per mediated action class: the maximum outage the deployment rides through on unexpired, unconsumed permits (Section 10), and whether work suppressed by fail-closed is queued for resume or dropped;¶
the runtime enforcement evidence mechanism and retention window (Section 11);¶
the locations of the deployment-published evidence signing key sets (the runtime evidence companion's PDP and PEP key sets, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence], resolve here), and, where the agent-isolated evidence-emission condition is claimed, its per-emitter declaration (Section 4.7);¶
where a High-Assurance Agent claim rests on EAT evidence (Section 12.1, Section 12.2), the per-row selections the evidence table requires: the claim or profile identifiers, the expected measurements or reference values, the appraisal policy, the attester identity, and the freshness rule;¶
the reconciliation window for matching execution-outcome evidence to decisions, the component responsible for orphaned-evidence and sequence-gap detection and for actively reconciling each unresolved outcome within the window, and that component's alerting obligation (Section 11).¶
A deployment MUST NOT claim runtime enforcement for a resource, action
class, authorization_details type, or execution path outside that
declared scope. A Mission Issuer conforms to the issuance profile; it
does not become a runtime-conforming deployment merely by issuing
Mission-bound tokens. The converse is a stated posture, not a
failure: a resource or class outside the declared scope relies on
issuance gating and token-lifetime freshness (Section 7.4),
and the Enforcement Scope Statement says so. This profile does not
require every resource to evaluate Mission state; it requires the
deployment to say which do.¶
Within the declared scope the duties tier by action class, and the tiers have names; the Enforcement Scope Statement names which tier covers which class.¶
What every conforming deployment carries:¶
Claimed per mediated class and required for the high-consequence classes:¶
One bound is stated rather than implied: reconciliation detects divergence between decisions and outcomes; it never manufactures exactly-once execution, which exists only where the resource itself supports idempotency, as its Operation Profile records (Section 5).¶
The enforcement scope is a deployment conformance statement, not an OAuth Authorization Server metadata extension. This document defines no discovery mechanism, registry, or wire format for publishing it. Different deployments can document scope through configuration, operational policy, resource-server metadata defined elsewhere, or a contractual profile.¶
The boundary between consequential and non-consequential actions is deployment policy, bounded by the classification floor below. This document defines a default classification a deployment SHOULD adopt, and a floor it MUST observe.¶
| Class | Examples | PDP gate | Parameter binding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-consequential | internal reasoning, cache reads, planning | not required | n/a |
| Consequential read | reading user data, querying logged APIs | MUST | not required |
| Consequential write | updating records, posting messages | MUST | MUST |
| Irreversible action | sending mail, payment, deletion | MUST | MUST, with TOCTOU reverification and evidence |
| External commitment | signing, accepting terms for the user | MUST | MUST, with TOCTOU reverification and evidence |
| Privileged administration | granting access, changing policy | MUST | MUST, with TOCTOU and evidence |
The table's per-class requirements (the PDP gate and parameter binding) are requirements for an action once it is assigned to that class. Assigning an action to a class is deployment policy, bounded by the floor below and by any Resource-policy minimum (Section 7): the profile does not require every read to reach a PDP. A read that is already fully constrained by the token's audience, resource, and the Resource Server's object-level authorization, and that does not materially affect the resource set or disclosure risk, need not be classified a consequential read, and is then not separately PDP-gated by this profile. A deployment MUST NOT, however, use classification to evade the floor or a Resource-policy minimum, and once an action is a consequential write or higher it MUST be gated and bound as the table requires.¶
One predicate cuts across the classes. An external-communication
action is a consequential action, of any class, whose effect
carries data to a recipient outside the deployment's trust boundary
(sending a message or mail, posting to an external service,
publishing, or any equivalent egress). The term names the egress
property, not a sixth class: an external-communication action keeps
its class and that class's requirements, and rules stated over
"external-communication and external-commitment actions" (the taint
rule, trifecta containment, egress metering) apply to any action
satisfying the predicate or classified external_commitment.¶
The three highest classes are defined by predicates; the table's examples illustrate them:¶
the action's effect cannot be reversed by the same authority within the deployment's own systems.¶
the action creates an obligation or communication binding the Subject to a party outside the deployment.¶
the action changes who holds authority or how authority is evaluated.¶
Classification remains deployment-scoped: each deployment applies the predicates to its own actions and systems. The predicates make the resulting classifications comparable across deployments and auditable: an assignment is justified by whether its predicate holds, not by resemblance to the examples.¶
Some operations have no fixed class: a shell, a generic HTTP client, a code interpreter, any operation whose consequence depends on its arguments. Such an argument-dependent operation is classified per invocation, from its normalized parameters, by a classifier the deployment declares in its Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2). An invocation the classifier cannot affirmatively place MUST be treated as the widest class the operation can reach, and the floor below applies to the classifier's assignments as to any other: a class the deployment cannot justify by its predicate is not a basis to leave the invocation ungated.¶
Classification floor. Four rules bound classification:¶
Actions in the irreversible, external commitment, and privileged administration classes MUST be treated as consequential and gated.¶
A Mission's purpose, or deployment policy, MAY raise an action
to a stricter class.¶
A Mission's purpose or deployment policy MUST NOT lower an
action below any minimum classification the Resource policy
(Section 7) sets for it, including a floor the resource owner
publishes in its protected resource metadata (Section 4.3.1).¶
In any case, a Mission's purpose or deployment policy MUST NOT
classify an irreversible, external-commitment, or
privileged-administration action as non-consequential.¶
The three classes of the first rule are the high-consequence classes, to which this profile's strictest requirements attach (action-bound approval (Section 4.4), mediated custody (Section 4.6), active-state freshness (Section 7.4), and execution-outcome evidence (Section 11), each as specified in its own section). A deployment that leaves such an action ungated does not enforce this profile for that action's class (Section 4.5).¶
A resource owner can carry its classification minimums to any PDP through its protected resource metadata [RFC9728]:¶
mission_action_class_floors:OPTIONAL JSON object. Each member name is an action identifier from
the resource's actions vocabulary
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); an action-family
identifier, in the issuance profile's action-family form, sets the
floor for every action in the family. Each value is the minimum
runtime action class for the mapped action: one of
consequential_read, consequential_write, irreversible_action,
external_commitment, or privileged_administration, naming the
classes of this section.¶
A PDP with access to the resource's metadata MUST NOT classify a mapped action below its floor. The member is the interoperable carriage of the Resource-policy minimum the classification floor above already binds; it raises, and never lowers, an action's class. A PDP that does not recognize a mapped value MUST treat it as naming a high-consequence class.¶
For the ERP resource of the worked examples (Appendix A):¶
{
"resource": "https://erp.example.com",
"mission_action_class_floors": {
"journal-entries.read": "consequential_read",
"journal-entries.write": "irreversible_action"
}
}
¶
The Mission's approval event ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) consents to the task and its authority bound; it does not consent to a specific action's concrete parameters at the point of use. For the highest-consequence classes, a deployment can require a second, action-bound approval: a fresh approval bound to the concrete action and the parameters the PEP is about to permit, distinct from the Mission's initial approval. A deployment SHOULD reserve action-bound approval for the actions whose consequence genuinely warrants a human pause: applied broadly it trains the Approver to rubber-stamp, and a rubber-stamped approval binds like a considered one (the consent-fatigue residual of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-security-model]).¶
An action-bound approval is a governed approval bound to the action: it is obtained from an independent Approver or policy authority, never self-issued by the agent or asserted from the agent's own context, and its rendered disclosure MAY be committed as Consent Evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]) bound to the action parameters. It composes with, and does not replace, [RFC9470] step-up authentication, which strengthens the actor's authentication context rather than approving a specific action.¶
Four rules govern the approval's enforcement:¶
A PEP MUST refuse an action for which the applicable entry's
constraints.requires_action_approval is true, or deployment
policy or Resource policy otherwise requires an action-bound
approval, and for which a valid fresh approval bound to the
action's parameters is not present. Absent a usable approval
mechanism, the action fails closed.¶
An action-bound approval MUST carry a maximum age, bounded by a
value the deployment set publishes, and MAY additionally carry an
absolute approved_until expiry (the AuthZEN binding surfaces ARAP's
approval expiry there, Section 15). The approval is fresh only before
the earlier of approved_at plus the maximum age and any
approved_until; past that bound the approval is not fresh and the PEP
MUST refuse.¶
A deployment SHOULD require an action-bound approval for the high-consequence classes, where a token-lifetime-wide standing authority is least appropriate.¶
Because the approval is bound to the concrete parameters, it MUST be reverified under the time-of-check to time-of-use rules of Section 8. A parameter change after approval invalidates it.¶
The permit lease does not substitute for the maximum-age bound: a permit's validity window (Section 8) bounds the permit, not the age of the approval it relied on.¶
This profile does not define the wire workflow that obtains the approval. A decision-API binding MAY route the requiring denial through a standardized access-request and approval workflow and carry the resulting approval back as decision input; the AuthZEN binding composes with the AuthZEN Access Request and Approval Profile for exactly this (Section 15). However obtained, the approval is decision input, not a bearer grant: the runtime decision of Section 7 remains authoritative, and a persisted grant beyond the single action is a governance state change the fresh decision observes (a Mission expansion, a role or relationship grant, or another authority update), never a property of the approval itself.¶
Two proposed OAuth-native transports are converging on this same
per-action moment, and both compose here rather than compete. The
transaction authorization challenge
([I-D.draft-rosomakho-oauth-txn-challenge]) has the protected
resource return a signed challenge that the client presents to the
AS, which obtains approval and issues a token whose
authorization_details describe the approved operation; under a
Mission, the approval event is the policy behind that challenge, the
Authority Set bounds what any challenge can be approved into, and
Consent Evidence is its record. The Mission Transaction Authorization
profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-transaction-authorization])
defines that cross-domain wire workflow, with the approval as
decision input and the issued transaction token restricted to its one
recorded transaction. The intent admission assertion
([I-D.draft-jiang-oauth-intent-admission]) has an admission point
sign a short-lived assertion binding an intent digest, its
originator, an authorized presenter key, and consent evidence, which
the executing endpoint re-verifies; a Mission-governed admission
point evaluates against the Authority Set, and its
consent-by-prior-grant case is exactly a reference to the Mission's
committed anchors. In both compositions the durable record this
family defines is what makes the per-action artifact accountable to
an approved task rather than to policy alone.¶
Enforcement only works at the component that can actually stop the action. A deployment claiming this profile MUST observe these rules:¶
The PEP MUST sit at the last controllable boundary before the action. A permit checked further upstream does not survive parameter changes, retries, or routing that happen after the check.¶
A token-issuance decision does not replace execution-time authorization. A token-only Resource Server cannot claim runtime enforcement; the issuance gate is governance, the runtime gate is enforcement.¶
A tool-catalog filter does not replace per-call authorization. Filtering a tool list by the caller's authority is exposure control; every consequential tool call MUST still pass the runtime gate.¶
An orchestrator's internal check does not replace a Resource Server's PEP. Defense in depth is permitted; substitution is not.¶
If no PEP can prevent the action for a given class, the deployment MUST NOT claim runtime enforcement for that class, and MUST name the action classes and execution paths it does mediate.¶
The boundary varies by action: an OAuth-protected API call is gated at
the Resource Server; a consequential MCP tools/call at the MCP
server; a local tool invocation, file write, or payment at the
orchestrator or whatever component drives the call; external egress at
an egress proxy. Where an action can be reached by an unmediated path
(a debug shell, an unsanctioned egress route, a direct connector), the
profile is not enforced for the classes that path reaches.¶
In an agentic deployment the agent component is itself part of the attack surface: it may be prompt-injected or compromised. The issuance and runtime gates do not make the agent trustworthy; they bound what it can do. A deployment lowers that bound further by not letting the agent hold the authority whose misuse is unacceptable.¶
Mission-bound tokens are sender-constrained
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]): whoever holds the
sender-constraint private key the token's cnf binds can present the
token. Mediated execution is a PEP placement that uses this: for the
action classes a deployment mediates, the sender-constraint private key
is held by the PEP that sits at the last controllable boundary
(Section 4.5), not by the agent component. The agent therefore
cannot present the Mission-bound credential directly; to act, it asks
the mediating PEP, which runs the decision of Section 7 and only then
uses the key. No new token type, credential handle, or wire protocol is
introduced: this is a custody and placement property of the existing
sender-constraint key. The mediating PEP is a co-trusted process in the
agent's own trust domain, not a delegate: the token is unchanged, the
agent remains the principal of record (client_id still attributes the
action to the agent), and no act-chain entry is added.¶
Agent Mediating PEP Resource | (holds cnf key) | |-- request ------>| | | | run the decision; | | | present token with key ---->| | |<---------- result ----------| |<---- result -----| | | | | X - - - - - - unmediated path absent - - ->|¶
For any action class a deployment mediates, the acting credential MUST be sender-constrained: a bearer token is incompatible with mediated custody, because a bearer token can be presented by whoever holds it, including the agent, so the mediating PEP could not be the sole holder of the authority.¶
For an action class it mediates, a deployment SHOULD hold the sender-constraint private key for the Mission-bound credential in the mediating PEP rather than in the agent component, and SHOULD do so for the irreversible-action, external-commitment, and privileged-administration classes. Two properties follow: a credential exfiltrated from a compromised agent is unusable without the key; and a compromised agent cannot reach a mediated action without passing the per-action check, because it never holds a usable credential for that class. Mediated execution depends on the agent having no unmediated path to the resource; a Mission-aware harness establishes that execution environment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]).¶
Mediated custody's realizable form today is gateway custody: a server-side gateway, an LLM gateway, an MCP gateway, or an egress proxy, holds the sender-constraint key and the Mission-bound tokens, and the agent receives no bearer credential at all. That shape is the claim's home: the custody properties above belong to a deployment built this way, and a developer laptop with a shell is outside them by construction, not by configuration.¶
Where the deployment issues tokens under the client-instance-assertion profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-client-instance-assertion]), the sender-constraint key is instance-specific: that profile forbids a key shared across a client's instances. Mediated custody composes with that rule in either of two shapes. The mediating PEP holds per-instance keys, taking custody of each instance's key rather than one shared key; or the mediating PEP is itself the attested instance that obtained the token, presenting the instance assertion and holding the instance key. In both shapes that profile's no-shared-key rule and this section's custody rules are satisfied together. Attestation-based client authentication and SPIFFE ([I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-attestation-based-client-auth], [I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-spiffe-client-auth]) can supply the client-instance authentication and workload credentials beneath this custody layer; they do not define the Mission actor, delegation, intent, lifecycle, or evidence semantics.¶
This narrows, and does not eliminate, the compromised-agent exposure. The mediating PEP becomes a trusted component whose compromise is out of scope here (Section 17); a compromised agent can still request mediated actions, which are gated, and can still misuse any low-consequence authority it legitimately holds directly. The aim is that the agent is structurally unable to take a high-consequence action unilaterally, not that the agent is trusted.¶
The set of action classes a deployment mediates is the load-bearing parameter here: a deployment that mediates nothing gains nothing from this section, however it labels itself. A deployment that relies on this profile to protect against agent compromise therefore MUST include the high-consequence classes in its mediated set; the protection is only as broad as that set.¶
Custody has a lifecycle. A deployment SHOULD prefer per-class
credentials with distinct cnf keys over sharing one key across
mediating PEPs, so that compromise of one mediating PEP does not expose
the authority of another. On compromise of a mediating PEP's key, the
deployment revokes the affected tokens and re-derives. A
sender-constraint private key is never published; rotation is
re-derivation with a new cnf binding plus revocation or expiry of
the tokens bound to the old key. The Enforcement Scope Statement
SHOULD state the custody replica topology (a shared HSM-held key
versus per-replica keys): replicating one cnf key across a PEP
fleet widens the exposure custody exists to shrink.¶
Mediated execution also places a controllable chokepoint on the egress path itself: content-level controls this profile does not define (data-loss prevention, redaction, payload policy) compose naturally at the mediating PEP, the one component that sees the full payload after the decision and before presentation.¶
An evidence-signing key is not an authorization credential, and its signature MUST NOT be accepted as a grant or as widening the Authority Set. Its compromise corrupts the record plane and, where signed history is a decision input (Section 7.2.8), can also corrupt later authorization outcomes within that envelope: a forged record is a forged precondition (Section 17). The record plane is what a post-compromise investigation relies on, so the property that the agent cannot emit records under an emitter's identity has an owner here, as a standalone condition a deployment claims per emitter and scope. No named claim of this document includes it; a composition that wants both prevention and post-compromise evidence assurance names it explicitly alongside the claims of Section 12.¶
A deployment claims the agent-isolated evidence-emission condition for a named emitter (a PDP, a mediating or executing PEP, or a companion-defined executor-side emitter) and scope only when all of the following hold:¶
the evidence-signing private key is generated inside the declared trusted holder boundary, or imported through a trusted procedure in which the agent never possesses plaintext key material, and is non-exportable to, and inaccessible from, the agent component, with that property preserved across rotation, backup, replication, restore, and migration;¶
only an authenticated identity for the named emitter's trusted emission path can invoke the signing operation;¶
the agent cannot submit a complete evidence object, or an arbitrary digest, for signature;¶
the trusted emission path constructs the record from its authoritative decision, refusal, or execution state and from request inputs it independently validates and normalizes; the caller cannot supply the completed record or directly assert the emitter identity or role, the decision or outcome, the protected record type, the sequence position, the evaluation or execution identifiers, or the authoritative interpretation of the Mission, scope, audience, and digests; and¶
a signing result cannot be relabeled or reused for another emitter, role, scope, audience, or evidence type.¶
The load-bearing property is the authenticated construction-and-signing path, not the storage technology: an HSM or KMS whose API the agent can invoke over arbitrary bytes is a signing oracle, a separate process the agent controls is not isolated, and an in-process signer inside a trusted PEP can be isolated where the control boundary is real. A signing service MAY accept a digest rather than the record, only over an authenticated channel from the trusted emission path with the record type and protected scope bound to the request; the signer is not required to parse the record schema.¶
The condition bounds forgery, not activity: the agent can still trigger real decisions and effects that cause the emitter to create its own records of them; it cannot invent or alter a record under the emitter's identity. The condition establishes neither the truth of an emitter's assertion nor the completeness or ordering of the evidence stream; those remain the concern of reconciliation, sequence-gap detection, and the transparency mechanisms (Section 11, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]).¶
Key separation is not part of this condition: an evidence-signing key SHOULD be cryptographically distinct from every sender-constraint, token-issuance, approval, and other authority-bearing key; a composing profile MAY require that separation; and isolation of one key plane MUST NOT be inferred from separation or custody of another.¶
A deployment SHOULD satisfy this condition for every emitter whose records cover the high-consequence classes. Signer unavailability MUST NOT fall back to an agent-held key, to an unsigned record represented as verified, or to an unconstrained signing path, and it relaxes neither Section 11 nor the runtime evidence companion's required envelope. Enforcement MAY continue through an outage only where the trusted emission path durably commits every required record for signing and publication under a declared recovery bound, preserving ordering and this condition; otherwise the deployment is not conforming for the affected decision or refusal and MUST NOT represent the condition as continuously satisfied. An execution outcome discovered after its effect is durably queued and reconciled, never synthesized or silently omitted (Section 10).¶
On a declared compromise of an evidence-signing key, the runtime evidence companion's key-set lifecycle applies ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]). The declared boundary is deployment-declared semantics and does not by itself resist backdating: a holder of the key can sign records carrying earlier timestamps. A record under a compromised key can be shown to have existed before the declared boundary only by an independent existence proof (a trusted timestamp, a transparency inclusion, or a Receipt, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]); even then the proof establishes existence before the declared boundary, not that the key or emitter was uncompromised earlier, and not that the assertion is true.¶
The Enforcement Scope Statement declaration for this condition is
per covered emitter, together with its key set and custody policy
(optionally naming kid coverage): the emitter identity and role,
the holder's trust boundary, the authorized invocation path, the
mechanism class (separate process or service, HSM or KMS, attested
environment), the custody and replica class across rotation, backup,
replication, restore, and migration, the covered action classes,
scope, and audience, whether the key is shared, the key-separation
posture, and an audit or attestation reference
(Section 4.2). Routine rotation under the same holder
and invocation policy does not require a new declaration; a change
in trust boundary or signer policy does. The declaration discloses no
operational secret. At base the declaration is declared-only; under
a named claim that composes this condition, the attested or audited
material covers the workload identity, the signer policy, and the
trusted emission path, not merely the private key's location, and
the weakest self-declared or organizationally audited term is named
plainly, as Section 12.1 does for path scope.¶
A Mission bounds exposure as well as authority. An agent exceeds the Mission envelope by invoking an action outside the Authority Set, but also by being exposed to inputs the approved task does not need: tools, data, memories, prompts, schemas, credentials, or downstream responses. Authority bounds what execution can do; exposure bounds what reasoning can see, and unnecessary context is the raw material of prompt injection and within-scope laundering.¶
A Mission-aware runtime SHOULD minimize exposure of prompts, retrieved documents, memory, tool catalogs, schemas, credentials, and downstream responses to what the active Mission needs. Where mediated custody is the deployment's declared control for an action class (Section 4.6), credential material and the sender-constraint private key MUST NOT be exposed to the agent component: exposure reduces mediation to advice.¶
Least exposure narrows what injection can read and what within-scope laundering can draw from; it is not information-flow control, and an exposure filter, like a tool-catalog filter (Section 4.3), never replaces per-action authorization.¶
An OAuth Resource Server that claims conformance to this runtime profile MUST publish or otherwise make available a Resource Server runtime profile for the protected resources and operations in scope. The Resource Server runtime profile is a deployment conformance statement, not an OAuth Authorization Server metadata extension and not a new access token format. It is the family's enforcement adapter contract for a resource integration: the artifact two independent implementations name and version to agree on a resource's action identifiers, parameter semantics, and enforcement composition, so the family standardizes the adapter contract rather than every business action.¶
The Resource Server runtime profile is a delta over the deployment's Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2): it inherits the enforcement-scope items and records only what is specific to its protected operations, restating an inherited item only where its per-operation value differs. An independently operated Resource Server MAY instead carry the full statement as a separable annex. It MUST define:¶
the endpoint families, methods, tools, or operation identifiers in scope, and the minimum action class for each, including any Resource policy floor above the default classification (Section 4.3);¶
the PEP location that can prevent each operation and any known execution path outside the claim, and, when the PEP and PDP are separate components, how they authenticate and integrity-protect decision requests and responses;¶
the Operation Profile for each protected operation or family: parameter normalization, default insertion, omitted optional fields, set-like array handling, and idempotency-key handling;¶
the permit validity window for each action class, and replay controls for permit use, including where single-use decision identifiers and idempotency keys are recorded and how long consumed identifiers are retained;¶
how Resource policy is evaluated and composed with Mission authority, including local object authorization, tenant configuration, legal holds, service invariants, and risk policy;¶
the runtime enforcement evidence fields and privacy treatment for decision and refusal records; and¶
a profile identifier and version, so a change to any of the above is detectable and two independent implementations can name the same adapter contract.¶
A Resource Server MUST NOT claim this runtime profile for an operation unless the operation's consequential effects pass through a PEP that can refuse the operation after token validation and before execution. A Resource Server that only validates the access token and checks static token audience or scope claims does not implement this runtime profile.¶
The Resource Server runtime profile MAY be documented in Resource Server configuration, resource-server metadata defined elsewhere, a contractual deployment profile, or another deployment-specific mechanism. This document does not define a discovery document, registry, or wire format for publishing it.¶
The runtime decision is downstream of ordinary access token validation.
Before using a token's Mission, authority, subject, client, actor, or
confirmation-key values as decision inputs, the PEP MUST establish that
the access token is valid for the protected resource and request. For
the Mission-bound JWT access tokens defined by the issuance profile,
this means validating the JWT per [RFC9068], verifying the issuer and
audience, checking token expiry, and verifying any sender-constraint
binding (cnf) under the proof-of-possession rules of the issuance
profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); this profile defines
no proof-of-possession mechanism of its own.¶
Where the validated token's mission claim carries the expires_at
member ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]), the
PEP or PDP MAY refuse actions past that instant without consulting a
state source: the value is an immutable commitment and a ceiling
only. It carries no liveness; the only-active rule and the
freshness requirements of Section 7.4 apply unchanged.¶
The underlying OAuth deployment MUST follow the applicable security
best current practice in [RFC9700]. In particular, a Resource Server
PEP MUST refuse a token whose audience is not intended for that
Resource Server, and MUST verify the proof-of-possession check for a
sender-constrained token before treating its cnf binding as
authenticated.¶
A PEP MUST NOT ask a PDP to authorize an action from unverified token
claims. If token validation fails, the PEP MUST refuse before runtime
Mission evaluation. If the deployment requires Mission governance for
the protected operation and the token lacks a mission claim, the PEP
MUST likewise refuse, unless the deployment establishes the Mission
binding externally (Section 7.3); in that case the absence of
the claim is not a refusal condition, and the join's verification of
the supplied Mission reference applies instead. When the PEP is an
OAuth Resource Server, it uses the
normal OAuth error behavior for the protected resource (for example,
Bearer token errors under [RFC6750]); this profile defines no new
OAuth error code.¶
Where the PEP and PDP are separate components, the decision request and response MUST be integrity-protected and the parties MUST authenticate each other. The PDP MUST accept token-derived inputs only from a PEP authorized for the declared enforcement scope. A deployment can satisfy this with a mutually authenticated channel, a signed decision request and response, or another mechanism with equivalent security properties. The PEP SHOULD send the PDP the minimum token-derived claims needed for the decision rather than the presented access token. If a deployment sends the access token itself to the PDP, the PDP MUST treat it as a credential, protect it against disclosure, and MUST NOT use it outside the declared enforcement scope.¶
Before a consequential action runs, its PEP MUST obtain a permit from a PDP that evaluates the action against the established Mission (Section 7.3). This is the normative contract. The decision API wire format is a deployment choice; a binding maps this contract onto a concrete API (Section 15).¶
The PEP MUST supply the inputs the PDP needs for the Mission-bound decision; Section 7.2 defines them.¶
On a deny, the PEP MUST refuse the action; a deny is terminal for the attempted action.¶
A deny need not end the task, however: a decision-API binding MAY mark a denial requestable and route it through an access-request and approval workflow (Section 4.4, Section 15). An approved request completes in one of two ways. An in-authority approval gate is satisfied by the approval attribute alone on the fresh decision; nothing persists beyond it. Missing authority is realized as a governance state change the fresh decision observes: a durable Mission expansion, a role or relationship grant, or another authority update. This profile defines the runtime decision; it leaves the request-approval loop, and any realization that persists authority, to the decision-API binding, the issuance profile's expansion mechanism, and the deployment's own governance.¶
A decision separates three response lanes, and a binding maps each lane to its wire. Obligations and advice are PEP work under the existing decision: obligations bind (a step-up, a mandated notification; failing one makes the effective result deny), and advice, where a binding defines it, is safely ignorable and never carries a mandatory control. Decision conditions (request binding, validity bound, use limit) are not work but constraints of the decision itself, evaluated at every use (Section 7.1). Governance rides the request-approval loop, never the permit: an access request tracked by a task handle, resolved by an approval or another authority-state change. Partial evaluation, residual policy the PEP completes locally, is the third lane; this profile reserves it and defines no residual form. Two things are not lanes: a description of requestable authority is payload a request may carry, and a transient condition is a denial outcome carrying a retry signal, calling for neither remediation nor a request. The AuthZEN binding realizes the first two lanes and the transient outcome as obligations, ARAP composition, and its transient-denial members (Section 15).¶
The PDP's placement is a deployment choice (co-located with the
Mission's issuer, embedded in the Resource Server, a tenant-scoped
service, or a shared service); this document does not mandate one. The
requirement is only that a PEP at each consequential boundary can
reach an applicable PDP.¶
In addition to every other required decision input, the runtime decision MUST require the action to remain within the Mission's current Effective Authority Set (Section 7.2.1); MUST enforce every applicable cumulative-consumption or stateful operational gate (Section 9); and MUST require a valid fresh action-bound approval whenever the applicable entry or applicable policy requires one (Section 4.4). Each gate is independently necessary and none grants, widens, or restores another.¶
Whatever the wire, a runtime decision presents one abstract output, and a binding maps each member onto its protocol rather than inventing parallel semantics:¶
an outcome: permit or deny;¶
an evaluation identifier and evaluation time, correlating the decision with its evidence;¶
on a deny, a reason from the binding's failure classification;¶
on a permit, decision conditions: declarative constraints on relying on the permit (a request binding, a validity bound, a use limit), evaluated at every use of the permit; a condition the enforcing component does not recognize makes the permit unusable, the reliance counterpart of the obligations rule;¶
zero or more obligations: mandatory enforcement duties the PEP completes under the existing decision, where an unfulfilled or unrecognized obligation is an effective deny;¶
zero or more advice items, where the binding defines them: safely ignorable hints that never carry a mandatory control;¶
optionally, an access-request signal marking a denial requestable through a governance workflow;¶
optionally, a retry signal marking a denial transient, with a wait interval; and¶
a reserved residual-policy member for a future partial-evaluation composition, which this profile does not define.¶
An approval produced by the governance workflow returns as decision input on a fresh evaluation (Section 4.4), never as output state. The AuthZEN binding maps this output onto its response context, the obligations profile, and ARAP (Section 15).¶
Runtime enforcement MUST evaluate every input below except the last: History (Section 7.2.8) is OPTIONAL, evaluated where the deployment declares it.¶
For a capability sourced from a discovered catalog (an MCP tool catalog, an OpenAPI document, or an equivalent source), where the validating server recorded a digest of the capability's extracted definition at derivation, the PDP MUST refuse the action when the digest of the capability's current extracted definition differs from the recorded digest (capability drift). The extraction rule per source format is the capability-binding companion's ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding]).¶
A source change that leaves the extracted definition byte-identical
does not by itself refuse. Where the deployment also recorded a
whole-source digest, that digest's stricter semantics apply and any
source change refuses. The recorded digests are part of the derived
authority and are covered by authority_hash
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Cross-format
canonicalization, signed capability manifests, and cross-catalog
identity remain out of scope (Section 16).¶
The runtime decision MUST include any applicable Resource policy. A Mission-bound token and runtime permit are an upper bound on authority, not a command for the Resource Server to perform the action. Resource policy MAY be evaluated by the PDP, by the Resource Server or PEP as a composed local authorization step, or by both. The action MUST fail closed unless both Mission authority and Resource policy permit it. Resource policy includes object-level authorization, tenant configuration, legal holds, service invariants, and risk policy.¶
Every constraints value on the applicable entry MUST be evaluated
against its declared input domain: the concrete action parameters
for parameter constraints, and, where the constraint's definition
declares them, the resource, the subject, Mission state, time,
history, or metered consumption. A constraint the PDP does not
understand, cannot supply the declared inputs for, or cannot enforce
or meter MUST cause refusal; it MUST NOT be ignored or reduced to
disclosure-only treatment.¶
When delegation is in effect, the PDP MUST evaluate the
authenticated act chain as part of the runtime actor context and
refuse a chain that is missing or malformed. When an act chain is
present, the PDP MUST NOT treat client_id alone as the immediate
actor.¶
Runtime enforcement consumes the actor context that results from the
issuance profile's delegation checks; it does not recompute the
issuance-time subset validation. The runtime decision MUST NOT
expand authority beyond the issued authorization_details. The
issuance profile's delegation constraints are not re-applied here
unless the deployment documents them as runtime Resource policy, but
a deployment MAY apply additional actor-sensitive Resource policy
(Section 7.2.3).¶
Token claims the AS verified under an attested-instance profile,
such as agent_instance_id and agent_model
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-ai-agent-instance]), are verified
actor context a deployment's Resource policy MAY evaluate; unlike a
self-asserted model or instance label, they are attester-backed
facts.¶
Where the deployment operates an agent registry, the immediate actor's registry state (status, revocation, approved deployment version) is further actor context Resource policy MAY require. A deployment that declares agent-state evaluation in its Enforcement Scope Statement treats the registry as a state source under this profile's freshness discipline: a declared staleness bound, and refusal when the acting agent or its deployment version is revoked or the state cannot be established within the bound (Section 7.4). The agent, Mission, and credential lifecycles gate conjunctively; a valid token never overrides a revoked agent or a non-active Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]).¶
The PDP MUST refuse if the decision context indicates the token is
expired. The issuance profile caps a derived token's exp at the
Mission's expires_at, so the exp check enforces the Mission's
expiry transitively. The standard mission claim and introspection
do not surface expires_at; where a Mission state source does
expose it (or reports the Mission expired), the PDP MUST refuse on
it independent of the token's own exp.¶
The PDP sets the permit's validity window from these inputs. That the action actually executes within that window is the executing PEP's reverification, not a decision input (Section 8).¶
The PDP MUST refuse unless the Mission is active
(Section 7.4).¶
The inputs above evaluate the request; this input evaluates where the undertaking stands. A deployment MAY evaluate policy predicates over the Mission's prior Decision and Execution Evidence (for example, a precondition that a named action class completed) as deployment-local context keyed on the Mission's identity. This is the sequence-aware half of the context asymmetry the architecture names ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]): the resource prices "delete database" the same in isolation and inside an approved migration whose copy steps completed, and only the layer where the undertaking's history accumulates can tell the two apart. The policy side selects: the deployment's policy or materialized view names the predicates a decision requires, and the requesting component supplies facts or an evidence reference, never the choice of predicate.¶
History is a decision input, never a grant. A history predicate
MUST NOT expand authority beyond the issued
authorization_details. Where deployment or Resource policy
requires a history predicate, the PDP MUST fail closed when the
predicate cannot be established or the evidence store cannot be
consulted. A deployment that declares history evaluation in its
Enforcement Scope Statement treats the evidence store as a state
source under this profile's freshness discipline: a declared
staleness bound, and refusal when the required history cannot be
established within the bound (Section 7.4). Cross-PDP
history composes through the deployment's evidence store or
registered transparency records
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]) and is otherwise out of
scope. How a decision request names a history predicate, and how
its evaluation is recorded, is the decision-API binding's
(Section 15).¶
Every decision evaluates one Mission: the established Mission. A deployment establishes it in one of two modes:¶
Credential-carried. The acting token's mission claim
identifies the Mission, under the issuance profile's binding
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The PEP takes the Mission
reference from the validated token (Section 6).¶
Externally established. The token carries no mission claim,
and the PEP supplies a Mission reference from the deployment's
Mission binding source. The PDP MUST verify that reference against
the acting credential under a join a binding profile defines; an
unverified reference MUST NOT establish the Mission. The Mission
Authority Server profile defines the concrete join for this mode
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]), and the AAuth
binding's reference propagation supplies the externally carried
reference for such a join
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]), as the MAS profile's
Mission Reference Propagation channel does in token-less MAS mode.¶
The mode each enforcement scope uses is part of its Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2). In either mode, the established Mission is the Mission every input of Section 7.2 (authority, Resource policy, parameters, actor, time, state) is evaluated against, and the Mission reference the permit and the evidence record bind.¶
A Mission-aware decision needs the Mission's current state, which a
token alone does not convey. A runtime deployment MUST define the
Mission state source it trusts for each enforcement scope. Examples
include issuer AS token introspection, a local Mission database, an
authenticated status or event feed from the Mission issuer, or a
short-lived cross-domain credential
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]) whose lifetime
is the deployment's accepted state lease. The materialized policy
view (Section 7.5) is not a state source: it commits the
compiled authority, never the mutable lifecycle state a decision
consults.¶
The substrate this profile enforces against provides at least a lifecycle-gated capability (Mission state at the issuer, with reliance boundable by credential lifetime alone) and MAY additionally provide a state-observable capability (an authenticated freshness source with a stated staleness bound). A deployment claiming runtime enforcement for an action class whose published staleness bound is tighter than the credential lifetime REQUIRES a state-observable substrate for that class; the high-consequence classes below always are. A lifecycle-gated-only substrate supports issuance gating and a lifetime-bounded action-time posture only: it cannot reflect a revocation faster than the credential lifetime, so it cannot host a class whose bound demands that.¶
The PDP MUST refuse a consequential action when it cannot establish,
within the deployment's published staleness bound, that the Mission
is active.¶
A state source MUST either report the Mission state with an explicit expiry or lease end, or report only an observation time, in which case the state remains acceptable only until that observation time plus the deployment's published staleness bound for the relevant action class. A permit issued from that state view MUST expire no later than this state valid-through: the reported expiry or lease end, or, absent one, the observation time plus the published staleness bound. The observation time alone, without adding the staleness bound, is never a permit's expiry.¶
When the credential issuer also holds the Mission, the PDP can learn state through token introspection ([RFC7662]) at the issuer per [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]. A non-issuer Resource AS introspecting a local token ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]) cannot report current Mission state; it can establish local token validity, but not issuer-side Mission freshness.¶
This document defines no cross-issuer by-Mission status query. Deployments that need tighter freshness than the token or cross-domain grant ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]) lifetime provides use the Mission Status profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]) or Mission Lifecycle Signals ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]), or an out-of-band trusted status feed.¶
The maximum staleness bound per action class and state source is declared in the Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2), together with the revocation latency it implies. Publishing the bound without its latency consequence is non-conformant. For a PDP-gated class, a Mission's revocation takes effect, in the worst case, after the staleness bound plus the permit validity window plus the class's execution bound (Section 8); the derived token's lifetime is the bound only for paths outside PDP gating. This document imposes no universal value because the acceptable latency is deployment- and consequence-specific; the bound is the number that determines the profile's headline revocation property. The per-class budgets below are the RECOMMENDED defaults for the value.¶
For the high-consequence classes, the state source MUST be an active freshness mechanism that can reflect a revocation within the staleness bound: token introspection at the issuer ([RFC7662]), the Mission Status profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]), a Mission Status List whose Status List Token TTL is within the bound (the status profile's swarm-scale pull floor, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]), or Mission Lifecycle Signals ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]). Token-lifetime expiry alone is not an acceptable state source for these classes: it bounds staleness only by the lifetime, so a revoked Mission keeps deriving consequence until tokens age out, which is the ambient-authority gap this profile exists to close.¶
For a deployment whose access tokens are short-lived and whose
issuance and refresh are state-gated per the OAuth binding
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), the refresh cycle itself is
a conforming active freshness source for any action class whose
published staleness bound the token lifetime meets: the issuance gate
is an active check, and a token that exists is evidence the Mission
was active within the lifetime. This source's revocation latency
floor is the token lifetime, so it conforms only for classes whose
bound admits that floor, and the higher-frequency sources (Status,
introspection, Signals) remain the path to tighter bounds.¶
Token-lifetime freshness. Below the high-consequence floor, token
expiry is itself a conforming state source: derivation and refresh
are gated on active ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), so a
token's remaining lifetime bounds the staleness of the authority it
carries, and the published staleness bound for a class relying on it
is the maximum token lifetime. Expiry is a state check performed by
the clock: no status call, no introspection, no change at the
consuming resource. A deployment declares it per class in its
Enforcement Scope Statement like any other source; what it cannot do
is reflect a revocation faster than the lifetime, which is why the
high-consequence classes require an active source.¶
Together the sources form a single freshness dial, and a deployment picks a position per action class rather than one posture for the estate. The comparison, informative:¶
| State source | Capability | Exposure bound | Per-action cost | Depends on | Cannot provide |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Token-lifetime expiry | lifecycle-gated | maximum token lifetime | local clock check | nothing beyond the token | suspend, complete, or any revocation inside the lifetime |
| State-gated refresh | lifecycle-gated | token lifetime (the refresh interval) | none at action time | the issuer at each refresh | anything between refreshes |
| Mission Status List | state-observable | Status List Token TTL | local bit read | one list fetch per window | terminal-state detail; a non-VALID bit sends the consumer to the authoritative surface |
| Status operation or introspection | state-observable | published staleness bound | one lookup within the bound, cacheable to fresh_until
|
status surface availability | revocation inside the bound |
| Lifecycle Signals | state-observable | delivery latency within the verified stream | none (event-driven) | stream liveness | the pull floor; a dead stream is stale state |
No position on this dial requires a per-request issuer call: the tightest posture costs one lookup per staleness bound, amortized by caching, and the loosest costs a clock. The dial is the architecture's freshness dial made concrete ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]), and the Enforcement Scope Statement records the chosen position per class.¶
The following are the RECOMMENDED default freshness postures per class, adopted absent a documented, consequence-specific analysis:¶
| Class | Suggested freshness posture |
|---|---|
| Consequential read | Token lifetime or a short state lease; tighter for privacy-sensitive, cross-tenant, or bulk reads |
| Consequential write | A short state lease, typically measured in minutes |
| Irreversible action | Active source required; immediate check or single-use permit, target under 300 s |
| External commitment | Active source required; immediate check or single-use permit, plus an egress PEP for external communication, target under 300 s |
| Privileged administration | Active source required; immediate check, suitable for composition with local step-up, target under 300 s |
| Audit-only | No active freshness required |
A deployment justifies any looser value for a high-consequence class in its Enforcement Scope Statement.¶
For a Mission carrying a nonzero containment overlay
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]), the RECOMMENDED
posture for a consequential read whose authorizing entry or action
class intersects the overlay tightens to a containment-aware state
source, for the remainder of that Mission: the overlay never clears
on the same Mission, and restoration is a successor Mission's own
approval ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section
"Restoration Through Expansion"). A deployment adopting this
tightening MUST name a containment-aware state source, not merely an
active one: a contained Mission stays active, so a Mission Status
List bit does not move
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section
"Propagation"). A containment-aware source is full Status or
introspection carrying containment_version, or Mission Lifecycle
Signals carrying the overlay change
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section
"Visibility"). A fresh derivation narrows what it mints and can
shorten the residual, but it checks nothing at action time, so it
carries Baseline, not Runtime-Enforced, and is not a containment-aware
source for this tightening
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section
"Containment Properties").¶
A deployment MAY instead tighten on any nonzero overlay regardless of class. That is a defensible conservative default; its cost is incident-time availability load on reads the overlay does not touch, since every consequential read then depends on state-source availability during the incident that triggered containment. The under-containment staleness bound for an affected class is declared in its Enforcement Scope Statement alongside the ordinary bound (Section 4.2); this posture adds no separate value, and the bound carries its latency consequence like any other.¶
The tightening narrows the post-taint window for the classes and deployments that adopt a containment-aware source; it does not close the Baseline residual ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment], Section "Containment Properties"). A consumer bounded by token lifetime alone, or a class this tightening does not reach, still runs to its existing bound.¶
A PDP evaluates a Mission against an action through a materialized
policy view: the reproducible, evaluable form of the Mission's
approved authority, produced by the issuing Authorization Server or a
trusted compiler and loaded by the PDP. A trusted compiler is a
component the deployment trusts to materialize the Mission's approved
authority faithfully and reproducibly; it is in the deployment's trust
domain and its output is bound by the content-addressed
policy_view_id below. The view is substrate-independent runtime
machinery; a decision-API binding carries only its identifier on the
wire (Section 15).¶
The materialized policy view MUST satisfy three properties:¶
Reproducible: identical manifest inputs, including the compiler
identity, produce a byte-identical manifest, and therefore an
identical policy_view_id, under the canonicalization rules of
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission].¶
Identifiable: the view carries a policy_view_id, so PDP cache
entries are addressable.¶
Bounded: materialization is faithful and does not enlarge the Authority Set's semantic bounds. A materialized view is an evaluation aid, never new authority.¶
The committed object is a canonical JSON manifest, never the engine
binary itself: JCS canonicalization applies to the manifest, and an
engine-native artifact enters the manifest only by digest, never
directly. policy_view_id is the integrity-anchor encoded form
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) of the SHA-256 [RFC6234] of
the JCS [RFC8785] canonical bytes of that profile's domain-separated,
issuer-bound integrity-anchor envelope with typ mission-policy-view:¶
SHA-256(JCS({
"typ": "mission-policy-view",
"iss": <mission.issuer>,
"value": <materialized view manifest>
}))
¶
policy_view_id is an envelope anchor under the substrate's default
commitment construction, which this document imports normatively
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]).¶
The committed manifest MUST carry:¶
mission_id and authority_hash: the Mission's identifier and
Authority Set integrity anchor.¶
policy_version: the derivation policy_version recorded at the
approval event.¶
compiler: an object naming the trusted compiler that produced the
manifest, with profile (the compiler's identity) and version
(its version), so a change in compiler identity or version is
itself a reproducibility input rather than an unaccounted
difference.¶
Either policy_ir, the normalized policy intermediate
representation as JSON, or artifact, an object carrying digest
(the integrity-anchor encoded digest of the engine-native artifact)
and encoding (naming the artifact's format), for a deployment
that compiles to an engine-native form this document does not
standardize.¶
The manifest MUST NOT embed Mission lifecycle state: three independent
values govern reliance, and conflating them is the common
implementation error. policy_view_id is the content identity of the
compiled authority and the cache key. A mission_state_version, where
the deployment serves one ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]),
versions the mutable lifecycle state the decision consulted. The state
observation's freshness or lease bounds how long that consultation
stands (Section 7.4). A state transition invalidates reliance
through the version and freshness values without re-identifying the
compiled authority; the manifest acquires a new policy_view_id only
when the authority it compiles, or the compiler that compiled it,
changes. A consistency check between a decision request's Mission
reference and the loaded view is therefore an equality test: the
request's Mission id and authority_hash either equal the committed
values or the view does not apply. Because policy_view_id is a
content hash, any change to the manifest yields a new policy_view_id,
so equality on policy_view_id is the cache identity; it is never the
freshness test. This document defines no second canonicalization and
no policy-language wire form for policy_ir or the engine-native
artifact.¶
A structurally valid action can still be semantically out of bounds: every schema check passes while the content betrays the task. A deployment MAY add a semantic evaluator (a data-loss-prevention engine, an LLM-based content policy, an embedding-similarity check) to the decision path. This profile does not standardize the evaluator; it fixes how one composes:¶
Rubric. The evaluator judges content against the approved
task, not a free-floating policy: its rubric is the recorded
Mission Intent, whose integrity is verifiable against
intent_hash, optionally with the consented Authority Set under
authority_hash. A rubric that cannot be tied to the committed
record is ordinary deployment policy, not a Mission check.¶
Composition. The verdict enters the decision as Resource
policy, carried as deployment-defined context. It can deny, or
route the action to the existing affordances: an action-bound
human approval (Section 4.4, the decision API binding's
approval_required) or an authentication step-up, which the
decision API binding carries as an obligation on the permit
(Section 15). It MUST NOT widen authority and
MUST NOT substitute for a structural check this profile requires.¶
Evidence. When a verdict contributes to a decision, the decision evidence SHOULD record the evaluator's identity or version and its verdict, so a semantic denial is as reconstructable as a structural one.¶
Latency. The evaluator runs inside the invoking action class's latency budget (Section 14); a deployment that cannot afford a synchronous evaluation on a class routes the class to action-bound approval or narrows its authority instead.¶
An LLM-based evaluator is itself part of the attack surface: it reads the same adversarial content it judges, and can be injected by it. It therefore augments the structural signals (provenance, composition, enumeration, volume, re-consent) and never replaces them, and a deployment that relies on one for an action class states that reliance in its Enforcement Scope Statement.¶
Parameter binding is only as consistent as the normalization behind it, so this profile collects that normalization into a named Operation Profile: the per-operation (or per-operation-family) statement, part of the Resource Server runtime profile (Section 5), that MUST fix all of the following, so two implementers of the same operation bind the same bytes:¶
the action identifier and how it maps to a resource;¶
the parameter schema: which parameters exist and their types;¶
default insertion and omitted-optional-field rules applied before canonicalization;¶
set-like array handling and any other canonicalization beyond the issuance profile's rules;¶
exactly which fields enter the parameter_digest;¶
digest test vectors for the operation, each carrying the operation input before normalization, the exact normalized parameter value, the exact JCS UTF-8 serialization (or an unambiguous byte representation of it, such as UTF-8 hex), and the resulting prefixed digest; at least one vector MUST exercise a normalization rule that materially changes the input (default insertion, an omitted optional field, set-like array treatment, or another operation-specific rule), and at least one conformance case MUST present changed parameters that fail the digest match, so normalization drift between the PDP and the executing PEP surfaces at profile adoption rather than as a fail-closed outage;¶
whether a single-use decision identifier is required (versus a validity window plus idempotency key);¶
whether an execution lease is required; and¶
the evidence fields the decision and execution records carry for the operation.¶
The rules below are the normative requirements the Operation Profile records; a deployment that leaves any of them unstated for a mediated operation has not specified that operation's binding.¶
For a schema-bearing capability, a discovered tool that publishes
an input schema, a deployment MAY derive the Operation Profile
mechanically rather than author it: the parameter schema is the
published input schema; no defaults are inserted and omitted
optional fields stay omitted; every field of the raw arguments
object enters the parameter_digest; and the single-use,
idempotency, and lease requirements follow from the operation's
class. A derived profile is recorded with the capability's source
digest where the capability-source binding applies
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding]), so the binding
drifts with the schema that defined it.¶
A permit for an operation does not authorize arbitrary parameter
values. For consequential writes, irreversible actions, external
commitments, and privileged administration, the PDP MUST bind its
permit to the normalized action parameters through a
parameter_digest, and the executing PEP MUST recompute and reverify
that digest immediately before acting
(Section 8.5).¶
parameter_digest is sha-256: followed by the base64url, no
padding, SHA-256 [RFC6234] of the JCS [RFC8785] serialization of
the normalized parameter object. It MUST be computed under the same
canonicalization rules the issuance profile defines (duplicate
member rejection, significant array order, byte-for-byte URI
comparison); this document does not define a second canonicalization.
It is a canonical-object digest under the substrate's default
commitment construction, which this document imports normatively
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-substrate]): the I-JSON
requirement and the reject-unknown-prefix rule apply to computing
and verifying it unchanged.¶
Every parameter that influences the action's external effect (for
example, the recipient, destination, amount, or target object) MUST
enter the parameter_digest. A field the deployment excludes MUST be
shown effect-free in the Operation Profile, which records why that
field cannot change the action's external effect; a field whose effect
is not so justified MUST be included.¶
The Operation Profile MUST define default insertion, omitted optional fields, and set-like array handling before canonicalization.¶
Beyond the parameter_digest, the permit MUST also bind:¶
the Mission reference;¶
the token issuer, when available;¶
the token audience or protected resource;¶
sub;¶
client_id;¶
the actor context;¶
the sender-constraint confirmation key, when present;¶
the action;¶
the resource;¶
the authorizing authorization_details entry, or an entry digest;¶
the PDP's policy-view version; and¶
a permit lifetime control bounded by the Mission state freshness requirement (Section 7.4).¶
A permit is bound to the full set of authorization-relevant inputs it was issued for: the authorization binding, which a decision-API binding realizes as one normalized projection over those inputs, never as an enumerated subset of fields ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]).¶
The permit lifetime control is set by action class:¶
| Action class | Required permit-lifetime control |
|---|---|
| Reversible consequential write | The control MUST be either a single-use decision identifier or a short validity window combined with an idempotency key that prevents repeat execution of the same normalized action |
| Irreversible action, external commitment, or privileged administration | The control MUST be a single-use decision identifier: a validity window alone does not bound how many times such a permit executes |
Where a single-use decision identifier is used:¶
The enforcing component MUST record consumed identifiers for at least the permit lifetime.¶
The enforcing component MUST refuse, fail closed, any second presentation of a consumed identifier. This is independent of consumption metering and applies even when the action carries no consumption bound.¶
The consumed-identifier store MUST survive an enforcing-component restart, or the component MUST fail closed for permits issued before the restart.¶
A multi-instance PEP MUST share or partition the store so a single-use identifier cannot be consumed once per replica.¶
A single-use identifier bounds executions of one permit, not permits
for one action. Enforcement is an atomic state machine over the
(idempotency scope, idempotency_key) pair, not a comparison against
retained parameters, with three separated responsibilities: the PDP
prevents concurrent double-permits before an operation completes, the
PEP prevents a consumed permit from executing twice, and the resource
owns the lifecycle and prior result of a completed operation.¶
For every non-idempotent operation in the irreversible-action, external-commitment, and privileged-administration classes, the Operation Profile MUST therefore also define an idempotency key.¶
Before issuing a permit for a keyed action, the PDP MUST atomically
claim the pair (idempotency scope, idempotency_key) together with
the request's operation identity, a canonical projection a
decision-API binding defines
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]). The claim is a single
linearizable operation: of two concurrent requests presenting the
same scope and key, exactly one obtains the claim, and the other
observes it.¶
For a re-presentation whose cache key is equal to the prior
decision's and whose claim matches (same idempotency scope and key,
same operation identity), while the prior permit is unexpired and
its evaluation_id unconsumed, the PDP SHOULD return the prior
decision, so a permit response lost in transit does not lock the
action out for the reconciliation window. This is the only same-key
path that returns a permit: the PDP claim's purpose is narrowed to
preventing concurrent double-permits before completion, never to
replaying a completed result.¶
Unchanged: the single-use rule of Section 8.3 is
itself atomic. Before releasing the effect of a
use_limit-bearing permit, the enforcement scope MUST atomically
consume, or atomically reserve and then confirm, the
evaluation_id in a store that is linearizable across every PEP
replica of the scope. Two replicas MUST NOT both succeed in
consuming the same identifier; a replica that instead observes an
already-consumed identifier treats the presentation as consumed,
not as a fresh single use, a decision-API binding's
permit_consumed classification
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]).¶
The resource, not the PDP, owns the key's lifecycle and the prior result once an operation completes: for a COMPLETED duplicate the resource returns the prior operation result under the Operation Profile's rules. A fresh authorization denial is not the vehicle for result replay; the claim states below govern only whether a new permit issues, never what the resource returns for a completed key.¶
The claim resolves per state, keyed on whether the presented
(idempotency scope, idempotency_key) pair matches an existing claim
and whether the request's operation identity equals the one the claim
was made under:¶
| Claim state | Same key + same operation identity | Same key + different operation identity |
|---|---|---|
| claimed / permit-issued (unconsumed, unexpired) | return the prior decision (retransmission) |
idempotency_conflict, terminal |
| reserved / outcome unresolved |
duplicate_suppressed, transient (next_action: retry, retry_after within the reconciliation window) |
idempotency_conflict, terminal |
| indeterminate (window closed, outcome undetermined, Section 11) |
duplicate_suppressed, terminal (next_action: none); resolution is operational, never a new permit |
idempotency_conflict, terminal |
| completed (within window or tombstoned horizon) |
duplicate_suppressed, terminal (next_action: none); the prior result is available from the resource under the Operation Profile |
idempotency_conflict, terminal |
| failed | deployment policy: retry as a NEW operation requires a new key |
idempotency_conflict, terminal |
| expired past the declared horizon | outside the guarantee; treated as new. An indeterminate tombstone does not expire into this state (Section 11) | outside the guarantee |
A different operation identity under the same key is always a conflict, never a new execution: an idempotency key identifies one intended execution of one normalized request, the same discipline HTTP's own Idempotency-Key handling applies, restated here in the family's own terms. A consumed key never yields a second execution: retransmission returns the prior decision, and a completed operation's result is replayed by the resource, not re-executed. An intentional re-execution of the same normalized action is a new operation under a new idempotency key, never a retry under the consumed one, and an action-bound approval (Section 4.4) authorizes that new operation as such, never re-execution under the consumed key.¶
The idempotency scope is, at minimum, the Mission, the subject and the actor, the audience, the action, and the resource; a deployment MAY narrow it further and MUST publish the scope in its Enforcement Scope Statement. Volatile members MUST NOT be added to the scope.¶
For the high-consequence classes the deployment MUST retain a durable consumed-key record (a tombstone) for at least its declared idempotency horizon, published in the Enforcement Scope Statement. Tombstones are enforced, not merely retained: within that horizon a claim against a tombstoned key MUST be refused, never treated as a fresh claim. Outside those classes a deployment MAY scope the guarantee to the reconciliation window (Section 11), and it MUST publish which posture applies.¶
The executing PEP MUST verify the permit's bindings
(Section 8.2) and MUST recompute the parameter_digest
against the parameters it is about to use. A mismatch MUST cause
refusal: the permit does not authorize the changed parameters.¶
A permit authorizes initiation. An action still executing when the permit expires MAY run to completion, unless the action class requires an execution lease, which the Operation Profile defines; when a lease is required the executing PEP MUST stop or renew before the lease expires. For the irreversible-action, external-commitment, and privileged-administration classes the Operation Profile MUST define an execution lease or a published maximum execution duration, and run-to-completion applies only within that bound.¶
This closes the time-of-check to time-of-use gap and prevents a permit
from being replayed for a different request (the parameter_digest
mismatches). For non-idempotent consequential writes, irreversible
actions, external commitments, and privileged administration, the
single-use decision identifier prevents repeat execution under one
permit (Section 8.3), and the required idempotency key
prevents repeat execution of the same normalized action across
separately obtained permits (Section 8.4).¶
Consequential reads do not require a parameter digest by default; the evaluation request still appears in the evidence record, by digest where the parameters are sensitive (Section 11).¶
Deployments MUST require parameter binding for consequential reads when read parameters materially change the effective resource set or disclosure risk. Independent of that risk judgment, a binding floor applies: a consequential read whose parameters select a cross-tenant or cross-audience scope, request a bulk or export-like result, or choose the returned fields or destination MUST bind those parameters. A deployment MUST NOT classify such a read as not materially affecting the resource set. Other examples that materially change the resource set or disclosure risk include privacy-sensitive filters and aggregation level. Ordinary reads that do not change the resource set or disclosure risk can remain unbound.¶
This document defines no cumulative consumption bounds and no metering machinery. Cumulative bounds on Mission activity (budget, call counts, wall-clock duration), and the reserve, commit, lease, settlement, and distributed-consistency semantics that enforce them, are defined by an experimental companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]).¶
What this document fixes is the failure posture. As with all
constraints, an unmetered or unrecognized consumption bound MUST cause
refusal rather than silent pass-through: when an applicable entry's
constraints, or the Mission's controls, carries a bound that
expresses cumulative consumption and the deployment does not meter it,
the PDP MUST refuse a consequential action governed by it. A deployment
MUST NOT advertise consumption enforcement it does not perform.¶
Enforcement is meaningful only if failure is bounded. A PDP or PEP MUST behave as follows; in all cases the evidence record (Section 11) MUST be sufficient to reconstruct which path produced a refusal.¶
| Condition | Required behavior |
|---|---|
| Token validation fails, including sender-constraint verification | Refuse before runtime Mission evaluation |
Mission governance is required but the token lacks a mission claim |
Refuse before runtime Mission evaluation, unless the Mission binding is externally established (Section 7.3) |
| PEP-PDP channel authentication or integrity protection fails | Fail closed |
| Mission state cannot be established within the staleness bound | Fail closed for consequential actions |
| A policy-required history predicate cannot be established, or the evidence store cannot be consulted (Section 7.2.8) | Fail closed |
| PDP unreachable | Fail closed for consequential actions; do not proceed on cached permits past the window. An unexpired, unconsumed permit MAY execute during a PDP outage: executing-PEP reverification needs no PDP |
| A required evidence record cannot be signed or emitted for a consequential decision or refusal | Fail closed, or durably commit the record for signing and publication under a declared recovery bound (Section 4.7) |
Mission not active
|
Refuse; work already initiated reconciles under Section 11, never re-executes |
The Mission's expires_at passed, when known from the Mission state source |
Refuse |
Unsupported authorization_details type for the action |
Refuse |
| Unknown or unmetered constraint on the applicable entry | Refuse |
| Consumption bound would be exceeded | Refuse |
parameter_digest mismatch at the executing PEP |
Refuse |
| Re-presentation of a consumed single-use decision identifier | Refuse (fail closed) |
Required act chain missing or malformed |
Refuse |
Invoked capability identity outside the approved actions
|
Refuse |
| Resource policy refuses the action | Refuse |
| Request would broaden the Mission's authority | Refuse (expansion is out of scope) |
Every PDP decision on a consequential action MUST produce a runtime
enforcement evidence record. A PEP refusal for a consequential action,
whether before a PDP decision (for example, token validation failure
or PDP unreachability) or after a PDP permit (for example, a
parameter_digest mismatch), MUST likewise produce a runtime
enforcement evidence record with the available fields and the failure
condition. This document fixes the minimum record content and local
integrity requirements; the concrete record schemas, canonical byte
representation, and integrity envelope, together with the Mission
Receipt's portable schema (Section 11.3), are defined by
Mission Runtime Evidence
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
A record captures decision inputs, the applicable policy and authority references, the result, and the failure condition. No requirement in this section asks for the model's internal reasoning, and a deployment SHOULD NOT record model chain-of-thought in enforcement evidence: it is high-sensitivity content with no verification value the decision inputs do not already carry.¶
A record MUST contain:¶
the decision or refusal result and, on refusal, the failure condition from Section 10;¶
the parameter_digest for parameter-bound classes, or a
privacy-preserving digest of the evaluation request otherwise.¶
A record MUST also contain the following fields when they are available and trusted for the refusal or decision path:¶
the Mission reference (mission.id, mission.issuer) and the
authority_hash (and intent_hash when known: it is carried in
neither the mission claim nor introspection, so it is available only
to a PDP with direct Mission-record access, and most deployments
record authority_hash alone) it operated under;¶
the token issuer and audience or protected-resource identifier when available;¶
the authenticated sub, client_id, a client-instance identifier
(a deployment-defined correlator) when present, the sender-constraint
confirmation key when present, and the act chain projection when
delegation applies;¶
the action and resource identifiers (and the asserted capability identity when applicable);¶
the authorization_details type and authorizing entry, or a digest
of that entry when recording the full entry would disclose excess
authority or sensitive policy;¶
the decision identifier, when the PDP produced one;¶
the PDP's policy-view version;¶
the identity and role of the emitting enforcement component; and¶
OPTIONAL, a compensates_evaluation_id member linking a
compensating action's decision to the original evaluation
identifier it reverses, so a compensation can be reconciled against
the action it undoes.¶
For a token-validation failure, the record MUST NOT describe unverified token claims as authenticated facts. It MAY include a digest of the presented token or rejected claim set for correlation and forensics, subject to the privacy requirements below.¶
The authority_hash and intent_hash in a record are the
originating AS's commitments, cited as anchors; the PDP does not
recompute them and is not required to hold the full Authority Set to
record them, consistent with [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission].¶
For an action in the high-consequence classes, the executing PEP MUST also produce, after it acts, an execution-outcome record keyed to the permit's evaluation identifier, recording at least success or failure and the effective parameter digest actually executed, alongside the authorized parameter digest the permit bound ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]). This lets a decision and its execution be reconciled one to one, so a permit that was obtained but executed more than once, or executed for different parameters, is detectable after the fact. The detailed object schema is the Execution Evidence Object, defined by the runtime evidence companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
Reconciliation is bounded in time by the reconciliation window, orphan-detection component, and alerting obligation the Enforcement Scope Statement declares (Section 4.2): an execution-outcome record is expected for each decision within the window, and the named component detects orphaned evidence (a decision with no matching execution-outcome record within it) and sequence gaps in a Mission's records (Section 11.4).¶
An unknown outcome has an owner and a deadline, not only a window:
the declared component MUST actively reconcile each unresolved
outcome before the window closes, querying the resource and matching
evidence, and record the outcome the evidence establishes
(completed, failed, or suppressed,
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]). Evidence, never
the deadline, determines the result: an outcome the component cannot
establish stays undetermined-outcome, is escalated under the declared
alerting obligation, and is never synthesized into a terminal result.
Reconciliation survives the Mission: once the Mission is non-active,
it MAY record the outcome of work already initiated and MUST NOT
admit a new effect under that Mission (an action already executing
follows the run-to-completion rule of Section 8.5,
unchanged). Consumed and reserved decision identifiers and
idempotency claims persist across Mission lifecycle transitions for
at least the reconciliation window and any declared tombstone horizon
(Section 8.4): termination does not erase them, so a
post-termination retry resolves against the recorded claim rather
than executing again. An unresolved claim never becomes reusable
through time alone: when the window closes on an undetermined
outcome, the claim converts to a non-reusable indeterminate
tombstone, retained for at least the declared idempotency horizon and
released only by an evidence-recorded operational resolution, never
by expiry into a fresh claim.¶
A Mission Receipt is the portable, tamper-evident projection of runtime enforcement evidence: portable evidence of exactly what its kind claims (a rendered decision, an executed action's terminal outcome, or a pre-decision refusal, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]), as a Mandate ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]) is portable evidence about the Mission itself.¶
A Mission Receipt MUST identify the Mission the action was authorized
under, as mission.id and mission.issuer; a verifiable Mission
projection such as the cross-domain grant's mission claim
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]) travels beside
the receipt at its carriage layer, never in place of the tuple. It
MAY project
the policy decision (the decision identifier and result), the policy
state it was decided under (the PDP's policy-view version and the
Mission's policy_version), the
executor (the authenticated actor and any act chain), the custody
boundary (whether a mediating PEP held the credential, Section 4.6,
carried as a profiled issuer assertion),
the downstream target (the resource and audience), the outcome, the
timestamps, and, where a deployment chains receipts, the digest of a
predecessor Mission Receipt. The portable schema, receipt kinds,
evidence references, verification, and chaining are defined by
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence], which fixes the
minimum join and integrity core every Mission Receipt carries; the
members above are what a receipt MAY project beyond that core.¶
The following requirements apply to every record:¶
The Resource Server runtime profile MUST define the record's concrete serialization and canonicalization before storage and integrity protection. JSON records SHOULD use JCS [RFC8785] under the issuance profile's canonicalization rules.¶
It MUST be append-only and integrity-protected; the enforcement
scope MUST name the mechanism (a hash-linked log, signed segments, a
transparency anchor, or equivalent). Where a JSON record is
individually signed, the evidence_envelope JWS convention of the
runtime evidence companion
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]) is the
suite's one signing convention for evidence objects and SHOULD be
used, with a typ that names the record's own media type, rather
than a record-specific signing scheme.¶
Raw parameters MUST NOT appear in the record; when retained for
forensics they MUST be in separately access-controlled storage
referenced by an opaque identifier, with only the
parameter_digest in the record. A deployment SHOULD retain the
normalized parameters of denied high-consequence attempts in that
forensic store, so an auditor can reconstruct what was refused, not
only that a refusal happened.¶
Records for one Mission MUST carry a deployment-defined sequence indicator, scoped per emitter, so gaps are detectable and one emitter's records order without relying on wall-clock time alone. This does not by itself reconstruct Mission-wide decision order across emitters; that ordering is best-effort, from the correlation members and each record's timestamps together ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
The retention window declared in the Enforcement Scope Statement MUST be no shorter than the Mission's audit horizon, as defined in the Mission Record section of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission].¶
Digest encoding is uniform across this document family: every digest a
family document defines uses the sha-256: prefixed base64url,
no-padding encoding of the issuance profile's integrity-anchor rules
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The exceptions are externally
fixed encodings: the COSE hashed payload of the audit companion's
Signed Statements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]) carries the
raw digest bytes the COSE hash-envelope mechanism requires, and the
attenuation substrate's parent-hash form
([I-D.draft-niyikiza-oauth-attenuating-agent-tokens]) is unprefixed
base64url. Each exception is identified by its carrying context; the
sha-256: prefix appears in neither.¶
The strongest properties this profile enables 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. This section defines them as named claims, each a conjunction of conditions specified elsewhere in this profile, each individually verifiable, and none implied by base conformance. A deployment publishes the claims it makes, and the classes each covers, in its Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2), and demonstrates them with the negative tests of Section 13. The two claims together are the High-Assurance Agent bar of the Mission Assurance Levels ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]).¶
"Protects against agent compromise" is a verifiable claim, not a label. A deployment claims agent-compromise-resistant enforcement only when, for the high-consequence classes, the four conditions below hold and the deployment's path scope is declared and audited as this section then states. Each condition below is MUST under this claim regardless of its base-profile level; the table at the end of this section records each condition's base-profile level.¶
the sender-constraint private key is held by the mediating PEP, not by the agent component, gateway custody being the realizable shape (Section 4.6), and is generated in the mediating PEP or its HSM and never transferred from the agent;¶
each such action requires an action-bound approval (Section 4.4);¶
the disclosure rendered to the Approver for an action-bound approval is derived from the bound normalized parameters by a component isolated from the agent (the approval service or the mediating PEP), never composed by the agent, and the rendering SHOULD be committed as Consent Evidence, raising the base profile's MAY (Section 4.4); and¶
the Mission state source for those classes is an active freshness mechanism, not token-lifetime expiry (Section 7.4).¶
The fifth term of the claim is the path scope, and it is not a protocol-verifiable conformance condition; this claim does not present it as one. That governed work runs with no unmediated path to the mediated classes, and with no token-endpoint, refresh, or exchange path by which the agent obtains a fresh usable credential for them bound to a key it controls, is the deployment audit obligation the harness profile already names ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]). It is declared in the Enforcement Scope Statement, in the mediated-paths declaration and the unmediated-path exclusions (Section 4.2), with the declared scope covering fresh-credential paths as well as action paths, and it is audited organizationally, with the negative tests of Section 13 as its observable check. The claim therefore reads: the four conditions above, each verifiable, plus the declared-and-audited path scope. The weakest term of that conjunction is a self-declared scope statement, and a deployment making this claim states that plainly rather than implying a stronger term.¶
A deployment MAY satisfy the action-bound approval condition for a batch through one approval that binds an enumerated list of parameter digests, each consumed single-use, so the human pause stays meaningful at volume rather than degrading into per-action rubber-stamping (Section 4.4).¶
A deployment that leaves any of the four conditions unmet, or whose Enforcement Scope Statement does not declare the path scope, MUST NOT claim agent-compromise-resistant enforcement; it may still claim base runtime conformance. The claim names exactly the set of classes it covers. This claim additionally requires execution-environment attestation of the scope statement, the condition Section 12.2 states for both High-Assurance Agent claims.¶
The guarantee is the conjunction of these conditions, not any one of them. Mediated custody alone prevents only off-path presentation of the credential: the agent still initiates every action and supplies every parameter, and the mediating PEP executes any in-scope action the agent requests. What bounds a compromised agent is custody and complete PEP placement and correct classification acting together, so the claim is no stronger than the weakest of the three, and "mediated custody" on its own is not the property.¶
Each unmet condition loses a specific property; the base-profile column records the level each condition has outside this claim:¶
| Condition unmet | Base-profile level | Property lost |
|---|---|---|
| Custody in the mediating PEP | SHOULD (Section 4.6) | Key exfiltration |
| Path scope declared and audited (no unmediated path to the actions or to fresh credentials for them) | Declared in the Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2); the audit is this claim's term | Off-path execution or fresh-credential acquisition |
| Action-bound approval | SHOULD (Section 4.4) | Unattended high-consequence action |
| Agent-independent approval rendering | Stated only by this claim | Approval decided on agent-composed disclosure |
| Active-state freshness | MUST (Section 7.4) | Revocation lag bounded only by token lifetime |
The name is unrelated to Mission Containment ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]), the issuer-held overlay that removes capability from a Mission's Authority Set. Trifecta containment names resistance to the exfiltration trifecta below; Mission Containment names a governance operation over the Authority Set. Context distinguishes the two, and a deployment that runs both keeps the terms separate in its Enforcement Scope Statement.¶
An agent that holds private-data authority, is exposed to untrusted content, and can communicate externally combines the three ingredients of injection-driven exfiltration (Section 17.3). The profiles gate each ingredient separately; this claim names the composite. A deployment claims trifecta containment for a Mission's governed work only when all of the following hold, each MUST under this claim regardless of its base-profile level:¶
Private-data exposure. Least exposure (Section 4.8) is applied: the context surfaced to the agent is scoped to the active Mission, and credential material stays out of the agent for every mediated class (Section 4.6).¶
Untrusted content. A taint policy for untrusted content, as the harness profile defines one ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]), is in force and its egress rule is enforced, not advisory: a consequential external-communication or external-commitment action whose bound parameters derive from tainted content (or, under session-level taint, any such action in a tainted session) obtains a fresh action-bound approval (Section 4.4) or is refused. The harness profile's pre-consented egress carve-out applies: a send to a destination the Approver concretely named at approval is not human-gated on taint grounds alone, and for content-derived destinations, those outside the approved set, the full polarity, every tainted egress human-gated, remains a condition of this claim. Where the decision-API binding carries taint context ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]), the PDP enforces the rule; otherwise the harness does, and the scope statement says which.¶
External communication. The external-communication and external-commitment classes are mediated: no unmediated path, the scope statement's egress-channel enumeration covers them ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]), and the sender-constraint keys are held by the mediating PEP (Section 4.6).¶
The claim is published with the enforcement-scope conformance statement (Section 4.2). It is containment, not immunity: the limits of Section 17.3 stand, in particular within-scope laundering, bounded quantitatively where an egress-volume bound is metered ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]), and PEP-placement completeness.¶
Both this claim and agent-compromise-resistant enforcement (Section 12.1) rest on the execution-environment scope statement, a self-declared artifact: the wire alone does not let a relying party distinguish a deployment that built the declared isolation from one that only published the statement.¶
The conditions the two claims name do not share one evidence type. The table below fixes, per condition: a stable identifier, the evidence that authoritatively establishes it, the scope that evidence covers, the verifier and trust anchor a relying party checks it against, the freshness the evidence must carry, and the behavior when the evidence is missing.¶
| Condition | Evidence producer/type | Covered scope | Verifier / trust anchor | Freshness | Failure behavior |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
key_custody: the sender-constraint key is held and generated in the mediating PEP, never transferred to the agent (Section 12.1, Section 4.6) |
EAT ([RFC9711]) | The mediating PEP's key-holding component | The relying party, against the attester identity and appraisal policy the Enforcement Scope Statement selects for this row | The nonce, timestamp, or session-binding rule the statement selects for this row, current at the session or credential issuance the claim covers | Absent, stale, or unverifiable evidence, or a missing selection this row requires, makes the claim unavailable |
isolation_boundary: the execution environment separates the agent component from the mediating PEP, approval service, and rendering component, and credential material stays out of the agent (Section 12.1, Section 12.2, Section 4.6) |
EAT ([RFC9711]) | The boundary between the agent component and each isolated component | The relying party, against the attester identity and appraisal policy the statement selects for this row | The freshness rule the statement selects for this row, current at the session the claim covers | Absent, stale, or unverifiable evidence, or a missing selection this row requires, makes the claim unavailable |
workload_measurement: the attested component runs the software the Enforcement Scope Statement declares (Section 12.1, Section 4.2) |
EAT ([RFC9711]) | Each component the statement names as isolated or mediating | The relying party, against the attester identity, appraisal policy, and reference values the statement selects for this row | The freshness rule the statement selects for this row, current at attestation time | Absent, stale, or unverifiable evidence, or a missing selection this row requires, makes the claim unavailable |
approval_policy: each action in the claimed classes requires action-bound approval (Section 12.1, Section 4.4) |
Signed configuration, or independent service evidence from the approval service | The approval service's enforcement over the classes claimed | The auditor reading the configuration, against the approval service's operator key | Current with the approval service's active policy version | Unknown or unverifiable configuration makes the claim unavailable |
rendering_independence: the disclosure is derived from the bound normalized parameters, never composed by the agent (Section 12.1, Section 4.4) |
Independent service evidence, the committed Consent Evidence where available | The rendering component's output for the approval event claimed | The party evaluating the evidence, against the rendering component's or Consent Evidence signer's key | Per approval event | An approval event lacking this evidence cannot be counted toward the claim; a class with no such event verified does not carry the claim |
freshness_sourcing: the Mission state source is an active freshness mechanism, not token-lifetime expiry (Section 12.1, Section 7.4) |
Signed configuration naming the state source and its staleness bound ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]), or independent evidence from the state source | The state source used for the classes claimed | The auditor reading the Deployment Profile, against the state source's operator key | The published staleness bound | A stale or unverifiable state source makes the claim unavailable |
path_completeness: no unmediated path reaches the mediated classes or a fresh usable credential for them (Section 12.1) |
Negative tests (Section 13) and organizational topology audit | Every path to the classes claimed, deployment-wide | The auditor who ran or reviewed the tests and audit, an organizational anchor | Per the deployment's stated audit cadence | Untested, stale, or a found unmediated path makes the claim unavailable |
least_exposure: the context surfaced to the agent (prompts, retrieved documents, memory, tool catalogs, schemas, and downstream responses) is scoped to the active Mission (Section 12.2, Section 4.8) |
Signed configuration naming the exposure-scoping rule for the classes claimed, and negative tests demonstrating out-of-Mission context is withheld | The exposure-scoping rule's coverage over the classes claimed | The auditor reading the configuration, against the deployment's operator key | Current with the deployment's active exposure-scoping configuration version | Unknown, stale, or unverifiable configuration, or a found unscoped exposure, makes the claim unavailable |
taint_egress_topology: the taint policy and egress rule are enforced, and every egress channel is enumerated (Section 12.2) |
Topology audit (channel enumeration) and negative tests | Every egress channel available to the agent's execution environment | The auditor, an organizational anchor | Per audit cycle or channel-inventory change | A stale enumeration or a found unenumerated channel makes the claim unavailable |
A deployment claiming either named property MUST bind its statement to the evidence this table names, for each condition its Enforcement Scope Statement claims. Evidence that is unknown, stale, or unverifiable for a required condition makes the named claim unavailable.¶
For each condition this table assigns to EAT evidence, the Enforcement Scope Statement MUST select the claim or profile identifiers the attestation carries, the expected measurements or reference values it is appraised against, the appraisal policy applied, the attester identity, and a checkable nonce, timestamp, or session-binding freshness rule. Entity Attestation Token ([RFC9711]) evidence, carried under the AI-agent-instance profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-ai-agent-instance]), establishes the execution-environment fact a row assigns to it only against those selections; where a selection this paragraph names is absent, the token is a declaration or evidence input, not proof, and the named claim is unavailable on the same terms. Verified EAT evidence does not by itself establish the exposure, approval, rendering, freshness, path, or topology facts the table assigns elsewhere, and a deployment MUST NOT represent EAT evidence alone as satisfying those. The requirement is scoped to these two High-Assurance Agent claims; base runtime conformance does not require this evidence map, and a deployment claiming only the base profile MAY publish its scope statement unattested.¶
The agent-compromise-resistant claim (Section 12.1) rests on PEP-placement completeness, which is a deployment property no protocol element proves. A deployment SHOULD demonstrate it with negative tests: each of the following bypass attempts MUST be refused or contained by a conforming deployment that makes the relevant claim, and a deployment SHOULD retain evidence that it ran them.¶
| Bypass attempt | Required outcome |
|---|---|
| Agent calls a mediated tool directly, around the PEP | Blocked (no unmediated path) |
| Agent presents a cached token after Mission revocation | Blocked within the freshness bound |
| Agent resumes background work after Mission state went stale | Paused or refused on resume re-check |
| Agent delegates to a sub-agent with no explicit delegation | Blocked (no inheritance by session ancestry) |
| Agent alters action parameters after the permit is issued | Blocked by parameter-digest reverification |
| Agent requests or receives context outside the active Mission's scope | Refused or withheld |
| Agent egresses over a secondary channel (DNS, logs, shared store) | Blocked if the channel is in the mediated set; otherwise declared outside the claim |
These are the observable form of the requirements stated normatively above; a deployment's Enforcement Scope Statement (Section 4.2) names which it enforces and which paths it excludes.¶
The agent-isolated evidence-emission condition (Section 4.7) has its own observable form; a deployment claiming it SHOULD demonstrate, per covered emitter:¶
| Bypass attempt | Required outcome |
|---|---|
| Agent attempts to export or read an evidence-signing private key | Refused |
| Agent submits a complete evidence object, or a raw digest, for signature | Refused |
| An authenticated emitter requests a signature for a different record type, role, scope, or audience | Refused |
| One emitter identity invokes another emitter's key or emission path | Refused |
A separated evidence key is presented for use as a cnf or token-issuance key |
Refused, where the deployment claims key separation |
| The evidence signer is unavailable | No fallback to an agent-held key, an unsigned record represented as verified, or an unconstrained signing path |
These tests demonstrate the exposed control surface; they do not prove the absence of a hidden bypass, which remains an attestation, audit, and path-completeness property.¶
Three properties govern how this profile scales.¶
Token lifetime trades against the enforcement layer. The issuance profile recommends short-lived tokens because, in an issuance-only deployment, token expiry is the revocation cutoff. Where this profile's enforcement covers the high-consequence classes with an active-freshness state source, the PDP is the cutoff for the actions that matter, and a deployment MAY extend token lifetimes for issuance-load reasons without silently losing the kill switch; where issuance gating is the only control, short lifetimes remain the control and the issuance profile's recommendation stands. The choice belongs in the Enforcement Scope Statement: what stops a revoked Mission, at what latency, is a fact that statement already declares (Section 4.2).¶
The consistency unit is the Mission. Every strongly consistent
requirement this profile and its companions impose, the atomic
active check, single-use decision identifiers, and the consumption
counters and exclusivity latches of the metering companion
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]), is scoped to one
Mission. A multi-node PDP therefore shards its state by the Mission
Identifier with no cross-shard coordination; only a
deployment-configured aggregate bound crosses that partition and is
provisioned as its own consistency domain. Fail-closed applies per
action class (Section 10): a PDP outage stops consequential
work and nothing else.¶
Decision latency is budgeted by class. The synchronous cost of this profile is confined to the actions whose consequences warrant it. Classification (Section 4.3) is the first lever: only consequential actions need a permit, and only the high-consequence classes must hold a synchronous gate. For the rest of the governed surface the common-case decision is local: a PDP embedded in or colocated with its PEP evaluates against a materialized policy view (Section 7.5) whose network cost is paid once per freshness window, not per action; a permit's validity window covers the follow-through of one normalized action (Section 8); the decision API's batch evaluation amortizes fan-out (Section 15); and metering leases amortize the metered classes ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]). Offline attenuation ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-attenuation]) removes the issuer from sub-agent fan-out entirely; its Experimental status tracks the maturity of its substrate, not a judgment that localized offline validation is optional at machine speed. A deployment for which a synchronous gate on a low-consequence class is too expensive reclassifies deliberately and records the choice in its Enforcement Scope Statement, rather than weakening the gate on the classes that matter.¶
Locality ends where the Mission's shared state begins. The single-use identifier store and idempotency match (Section 8), the metering counters and exclusivity latch ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]), and the per-Mission evidence sequence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]) are strongly consistent state scoped to one Mission. An embedded PDP evaluating an action that consults any of them pays the round trip to the Mission's consistency domain wherever the decision runs, so the materialized view localizes only the actions that touch none of them; for the high-consequence classes, whose permits are single-use, the Mission's domain, not PDP placement, sets the latency floor. A deployment prices this deliberately: colocate a Mission's domain with the PEPs that act under it, or accept the hop for the classes that require it.¶
The decision contract of Section 7 is abstract: it fixes the inputs, the permit, and the invariants, not a wire format. A decision API binding maps that contract onto a concrete PEP-PDP wire protocol. For deployments using the OpenID AuthZEN Authorization API [AUTHZEN], the normative binding is the Mission-Bound Runtime Enforcement: AuthZEN Profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen], which specifies how the Mission and actor inputs, the decision and evidence objects, and the denial classification map onto the AuthZEN request and response. Other decision APIs may be bound by other specifications. A deployment that uses a different decision API MUST specify that binding in the same way.¶
This document defines no binding of its own. Keeping the binding in a separate specification preserves substrate-independence: the enforcement contract, action classification (Section 4.3), PEP placement (Section 4.5), parameter binding (Section 8), the consumption-bound failure posture (Section 9), and runtime enforcement evidence (Section 11) are the substance, and they do not depend on the decision wire.¶
The following compose with this profile but are deferred to future work and are not required to enforce it:¶
a standardized enforcement-scope manifest format and discovery mechanism;¶
cross-format capability-source binding beyond per-capability definition-digest drift (signed capability manifests, cross-catalog identity);¶
actor provenance beyond the act chain and attestation of the
execution environment: actor-signed hop proofs
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-actor-proofs]), issuer-signed hop
receipts ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-actor-receipts]), and
attested agent-instance identity
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-ai-agent-instance]) specify these,
and this profile consumes their results as token-derived facts
where present;¶
a purpose registry;¶
compilation of the Mission into an engine-native policy artifact (Cedar, OpenFGA, or equivalent) and standardization of PDP deployment modes;¶
offline or partitioned PDP operation (a PDP that decides while disconnected from its Mission state source); fail-closed (Section 10) remains the base rule when state cannot be established;¶
action-hierarchy and resource-containment subset extensions (this profile uses the flat subset rule of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]);¶
evaluation-context binding: an extension letting a high-assurance permit commit the resource version, policy-view version, and decision time it was evaluated against, hardening the target-drift residual of the TOCTOU considerations;¶
risk-signal and semantic intent-alignment inputs to the decision, which are advisory and deployment-defined (Section 17.4); and¶
integrity of the result a tool returns as the application relays it to the agent's model, and binding an executed action to the model's own decision (Section 17.4).¶
Structured per-argument attenuation of tool grants ([I-D.draft-niyikiza-oauth-attenuating-agent-tokens]) is a related issuance/delegation-layer primitive, not part of this runtime profile.¶
Gating every consequential action against the current Mission prevents an active Mission from acting as ambient authority (Section 7, Section 8, Section 11), closing the approval-to-execution gap the issuance profile leaves open.¶
It governs actions, not meaning. A request can satisfy every
structural check while its content does harm no schema names: the
approved send_email whose body carries what an injection extracted.
The profile's answer is to convert semantic risk into structural
signals rather than ask the PDP to judge content: provenance (the
harness taint context and its default-taint polarity,
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]), composition (the
quarantine pattern, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]),
egress-channel enumeration (Section 12.2), volume bounds
and exclusivity ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]), and
action-bound re-consent for the highest classes
(Section 4.4). A deployment that additionally runs a content
evaluator (data-loss prevention, an LLM-based content policy)
composes it as Resource policy at the PDP: the verdict enters the
decision as deployment-defined context, only ever narrows, and its
latency belongs to the action class that invokes it
(Section 7.6).¶
It does not make a compromised enforcement component safe. A compromised PEP can decline to consult the PDP or ignore its decision; a compromised PDP can return whatever decisions it chooses. Decision and enforcement evidence make such behavior auditable after the fact; they do not prevent it in the moment. Signed, externally verifiable decisions are future work (Section 16).¶
The strongest decision logic is void if the PEP is not at the last controllable boundary, or if an unmediated path can reach the action (Section 4.5). A deployment's claim is only as strong as the set of execution paths it actually mediates, and that set is the Enforcement Scope Statement's mediated-paths declaration (Section 4.2).¶
This profile assumes the agent can be prompt-injected and does not try to prevent that. It constrains what an injected agent can do by gating the external-communication leg: external communication is a consequential action, so every attempt is checked against the Authority Set, bound to parameters, metered, and (with mediated execution, Section 4.6) made unreachable to an agent that does not hold the egress credential. This is the architectural defense, gate the exfiltration against an authority the injection cannot widen, rather than make the agent injection-proof. Least exposure (Section 4.8) is the input-side complement: it shrinks what an injected agent can read and what within-scope laundering can draw from, without changing the limits below.¶
Two limits are inherent and a deployment MUST NOT overstate the guarantee. First, it is exactly as strong as PEP-placement completeness: every exfiltration channel an agent runtime offers (DNS, logs, error strings, a write to a store another process reads) is a channel that must be mediated, and this profile gates the channels routed through a PEP but cannot prove a deployment enumerated them all (the Achilles' heel of Section 4.5). Second, this profile provides no information-flow control: it evaluates each action in isolation against authority over resources and actions, so a sequence of individually-authorized steps can compose into an exfiltration no single check catches (within-scope data laundering), and cumulative consumption bounds, where metered ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]), bound volume, not flow. Closing that needs a separate taint or information-flow layer. A coarse session-level mitigation, downgrading egress authority once untrusted content has entered a session, is available at the harness layer ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]); it raises the bar but is not information-flow control.¶
Inspection-based runtime defenses for agentic systems share this profile's premise that the agent application is part of the attack surface (Section 4.6), and combine deterministic checks over the message flow with semantic checks over the agent's intent. This profile is the authority half of that picture; it composes with, but does not replace, an inspection layer.¶
Two of this profile's mechanisms are deterministic checks of that kind. Parameter binding (Section 8) ties a permit to the concrete parameters the action executes with, so an application cannot alter a tool call's arguments after the decision. Capability-source binding, in the capability-binding companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-capability-binding]), ties an approved action to the digest of the capability definition it was derived from, so a swapped or poisoned tool definition fails the decision. Both refuse the action; neither inspects the agent's reasoning.¶
Two adjacent checks are out of scope (Section 16). This profile evaluates the request path: it does not verify the integrity of the result a tool returns as the application relays it back to the agent's model, so an application can still falsify what the model sees; and it does not by itself establish that an executed action reflects the model's own decision rather than an application substitution. Mediated execution (Section 4.6) bounds the second case, since an action outside the Authority Set is refused however it arose, but it does not bind the executed action to the model's decision; a deployment that can establish that correspondence SHOULD. Both sit at the semantic and grounding boundary the issuance profile names a non-goal ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).¶
A semantic intent-alignment signal, for example a judgment that a
requested tool fits the task extracted from the conversation, MAY be
supplied to the PDP as advisory decision input. Such a signal MAY
contribute to a denial; it MUST NOT widen, grant, or refresh authority,
consistent with the inert treatment of goal and purpose in the
issuance profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Gating
authority on intent inference is out of scope: verifying an agent's
declared reasoning against the task is an attestation problem outside
both layers, and intent inference is not reliable enough to be
load-bearing for high-consequence authority.¶
Because "consequential" is partly deployment-defined, the
classification floor of Section 4.3 is load-bearing: a
deployment cannot evade enforcement by classifying a high-consequence
action as non-consequential. A purpose may raise a class but never lower it
below the resource owner's floor.¶
A permit is a lease, not a standing grant: stale Mission state MUST fail closed for consequential actions within the published bound (Section 7.4). A deployment MUST NOT advertise consumption enforcement it does not perform (Section 9); where cumulative bounds are metered, the exactness and consistency claims of the metering companion apply ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-metering]).¶
The history input (Section 7.2.8) makes prior evidence load-bearing for later decisions, so it is attacker-adjacent wherever evidence producers are compromised: a forged record is a forged precondition, and a suppressed record denies the step that depends on it. This is the existing evidence-integrity story, not a new one; the record integrity requirements of Section 11.4 and the transparency mechanisms of the audit companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]) are the countermeasures, and a deployment that makes history load-bearing weighs them as part of the decision path, not only as after-the-fact audit. Shaping Evidence is never an input to this or any authorization decision; the shaping profile's existing prohibition stands unchanged ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-shaping]).¶
Parameter binding (Section 8) ties a permit to specific normalized parameters and a short window or single use, so a permit cannot be replayed for a different request or survive a parameter change between check and use. The executing PEP, not an upstream component, MUST perform the reverification.¶
Parameter binding freezes the request, not the target. Between
decision and execution the resource itself can change meaning: a
revised document, a reclassified record, a query that returns a
different set. That residual is outside parameter_digest's reach,
and the mitigations are operational: keep permit validity windows
tight (Section 8), re-evaluate rather than re-present a
permit on retry, and, where the resource exposes a version or
revision identifier, bind it as a parameter so the permit commits
the target state it was decided against. An extension letting a
high-assurance permit commit its evaluation context (resource
version, policy-view version, decision time) is deferred to
implementation demand (Section 16).¶
The permit binding of Section 8 ties a decision to the
Mission, the token audience or protected resource, sub, client_id,
actor context, action, and resource it evaluated. It follows that a PDP
decision for one protected resource, audience, tenant, or operation is
not reusable at another: the executing PEP, which reverifies those
bindings before acting (Section 8), refuses a permit whose
bindings do not match the boundary at which it is presented. A
deployment MUST NOT relax those bindings in a way that would let a
permit cross a resource, audience, tenant, or operation boundary it
was not issued for.¶
A separate PDP becomes part of the Resource Server's trusted authorization path for the operations in its enforcement scope. The PEP/PDP channel therefore needs mutual authentication, integrity protection, and authorization for the declared scope (Section 6). Passing full access tokens to a PDP also extends credential exposure beyond the Resource Server boundary; a deployment that does so needs the same credential handling, retention, and disclosure controls it applies at the Resource Server.¶
General OAuth security guidance [RFC9700] applies to the underlying credentials.¶
Runtime enforcement evidence is intentionally durable and therefore
sensitive. It can reveal a subject's resources, action timing,
delegated actors, and Mission correlation identifier even when raw
action parameters are not stored. Deployments SHOULD minimize recorded
authority entries, store entry and parameter digests where full values
are not needed for audit, restrict access to evidence by role, and
document the retention window declared under Section 11. Access to
Mission evidence is itself a privileged operation a deployment SHOULD
audit, and classifying evidence fields by sensitivity lets access,
export, and retention key on the class; the audit companion's
minimization duties apply across the evidence this layer produces
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-audit]). Evidence
shared across resource boundaries can also correlate activity by
mission.id and authority_hash; deployments that require
unlinkability need an additional privacy design outside this profile.¶
This document registers the following in the "OAuth Protected Resource Metadata" registry ([RFC9728]):¶
Metadata Name: mission_action_class_floors¶
Metadata Description: JSON object mapping a protected resource's action identifiers to minimum runtime action classes.¶
Change Controller: IETF¶
Reference: this document, Section 4.3.1¶
The Mission-bound token claims this profile consumes are registered by [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]; any decision-API wire members are defined by the binding (Section 15, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]).¶
This non-normative example shows an Operation Profile and the
parameter_digest it produces (Section 8), so two
implementations can confirm they normalize and digest the same way.¶
Consider a journal-entries.write operation under an ERP
reconciliation Mission (msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-) whose
applicable entry carries a max_amount ceiling of 500.00 USD. The
Operation Profile fixes the parameter set and normalization: the
members are amount_usd and source_invoice_id; amount_usd is a
decimal string with exactly two fractional digits; no defaults are
inserted and no optional members are omitted; there are no set-like
arrays to order. For a 423.50 USD journal entry, within the ceiling,
the normalized parameter object is:¶
{
"amount_usd": "423.50",
"source_invoice_id": "inv_2026Q3_842"
}
¶
The parameter_digest is sha-256: followed by the base64url,
no-padding SHA-256 of the JCS [RFC8785] serialization of that object,
under the issuance profile's canonicalization rules (no envelope; the
normalized parameter object is digested directly). The JCS canonical
bytes are a single line with sorted member names and no whitespace:¶
{"amount_usd":"423.50","source_invoice_id":"inv_2026Q3_842"}
¶
parameter_digest = sha-256:WPVi6EnQ7H9Fh-qk9ADxmTg8zruOdVUX1esl-v3TfCI¶
The PDP binds its permit to this value, and the executing PEP recomputes it over the parameters it is about to use immediately before acting (Section 8); any change to a normalized parameter yields a different digest and the permit is refused.¶
This non-normative example shows the policy_view_id computation of
Section 7.5 over a materialized-view manifest for the same
Mission. This deployment compiles to an engine-native artifact, so
the manifest carries artifact rather than policy_ir; a deployment
that serves a state version records it in Decision Evidence and
consumes it through freshness processing instead, never embedding it
in this manifest (Section 7.5).¶
{
"typ": "mission-policy-view",
"iss": "https://as.example.com",
"value": {
"mission_id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ",
"policy_version": "deploy-policy:v17",
"compiler": {
"profile": "https://as.example.com/policy-compiler",
"version": "1.4.0"
},
"artifact": {
"digest":
"sha-256:9ZqK3mP7xR2vN4tY6bD1eF8jC5wH0pV2nR3kQ4mZ7tX",
"encoding": "application/vnd.example.policy-engine+bin"
}
}
}
¶
The JCS canonical bytes are a single line with sorted member names and no whitespace, shown here wrapped for layout only; remove the layout line breaks, adding no characters, to recover the canonical form:¶
{"iss":"https://as.example.com","typ":"mission-policy-view","value":
{"artifact":{"digest":"sha-256:9ZqK3mP7xR2vN4tY6bD1eF8jC5wH0pV2nR3kQ
4mZ7tX","encoding":"application/vnd.example.policy-engine+bin"},"aut
hority_hash":"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ","
compiler":{"profile":"https://as.example.com/policy-compiler","versi
on":"1.4.0"},"mission_id":"msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-","po
licy_version":"deploy-policy:v17"}}
¶
policy_view_id = sha-256:kFxuopgt9C4G7S4BhP7ayGhP49wG55HBnq0BzH09UZ8¶
Because the identifier is a content hash, any change to the manifest
yields a different policy_view_id (Section 7.5).¶
These non-normative scenarios illustrate the minimum record content of
Section 11 for the operation of Appendix A, in the
concrete record schemas and worked examples the runtime evidence
companion defines
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]); this document
carries no evidence JSON of its own. In this deployment, the Resource
Server runtime profile classifies journal-entries.write as an
irreversible action (a posted entry is corrected only by a
compensating entry), so the permit is single-use and
execution-outcome evidence is required. The policy-view version cites
the view of Appendix B.¶
A permit decision on the 423.50 USD journal entry of
Appendix A, within the ceiling, for subject
user_3p2q8mN1a0kV7tR and client s6BhdRkqt3 against audience
https://erp.example.com: the Decision Evidence record cites the
Mission, the authorizing mission_resource_access entry and its
max_amount constraint, and the parameter_digest of
Appendix A, correlated by evaluation_id
dec_4NqX7rT2vB9mK5sL8pJ0eW3yZ6cQ. The companion's own worked example
shows the concrete record
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
The executing PEP then acts and produces the execution-outcome record
keyed to that same evaluation_id: outcome completed, the
authorized and effective parameter digests equal, the binding-held
case, reconciling the decision and its execution one to one. The
companion's own worked example shows the concrete record
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
A later attempt on the same operation shows a parameter deviation
instead. A distinct permit (evaluation_id
dec_9HtV3wN6xQ1rB8mP5kS2eL7jY4zA) bound the digest of the same
423.50 entry; between check and use the parameters became 780.00
(normalized object
{"amount_usd":"780.00","source_invoice_id":"inv_2026Q3_842"}). The
executing PEP recomputed the digest over the parameters it was about
to use, found it differed from the authorized digest, and suppressed
the release (Section 8): a post-decision suppression is a
final disposition and is recorded as Execution Evidence, never as a
Refusal Record, carrying both the authorized digest and the differing
effective digest it recomputed. The companion's parameter-deviation
worked example shows the concrete record
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]).¶
This document is the runtime companion to Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 and builds on the OpenID AuthZEN Authorization API and the OAuth 2.0 Rich Authorization Requests and JWT access token specifications.¶