| Internet-Draft | Agent Security Requirements | February 2026 |
| Ni, et al. | Expires 1 September 2026 | [Page] |
This document discusses security requirements for AI agents, covering different stages of security interactions. These include provisioning, registration, discovery, cross-domain interconnection, and access control.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://liuchunchi.github.io/draft-ni-a2a-ai-agent-security-requirements/draft-ni-a2a-ai-agent-security-requirements.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ni-a2a-ai-agent-security-requirements/.¶
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With the widespread application of agentic AI technology across various business scenarios, its security issues have become increasingly prominent.¶
This document aims to provide an architecture addressing security requirements across different stages of interactions of Agentic AI use cases. These include provisioning, registration, discovery, cross-domain interconnection, and access control. This document establishes a starting point to guide Agentic AI security design, development, and implementation consideration discussions.¶
The target audience of this document would be IETF security experts that wish to understand AI Agent's behaviorial patterns, so to evaluate if the proposed security requirements are worthy of further security designs.¶
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.¶
+----------------+
| Master Agent |
+-^--------------+
+-+--------------+
| | Firewall |
+-+--------------+
|
-------------- (2) | Inter-domain--------------
|
+------------------+---------------------------------+
| +-+--------------+ Intra-domain |
| | | Firewall | |
| +-+--------------+ |
| +-v--------------+ |
| +-------+ Master Agent | |
| (3) | +----------------+ |
| | (1) |
| +----v-----+ +----------+ +----------+ |
| | Agent +----> Agent +----> Agent | |
| +----+-----+ +----------+ +----+-----+ |
| | | |
| +--v---------+ +---------v---+ |
| | DB | | API | |
| +------------+ +-------------+ |
+----------------------------------------------------+
¶
Figure 1. Architecture of Agent Security Control and Management¶
The architecture of agent security control and management is illustrated in Figure 1. There are four types of security interactions, in a sequential order:¶
Provisioning, Registration, and Discovery: Creating agent identity, establishing initial trust, provisioning agent secrets and credentials, onboarding agents to enable discovery.¶
Cross-domain Interconnection: Enabling secure, authenticated communication between agents across different trust domains.¶
Access Control: The Master Agent validates both intra-domain and inter-domain access tokens, creates internal workflow and manages different credentials for heterogeneous systems.¶
Therefore, the architecture includes four components:¶
Firewall: A network security device designed to monitor, filter, and control incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules.¶
Master Agent: The central orchestrating entity that manages multi-agent operations, including cross-domain communication, workflow coordination, credential management, and security policy management.¶
Agents: Autonomous software entities deployed in various domains to perform specific tasks.¶
Heterogeneous systems: API endpoints, microservices, tools, and databases.¶
The above architecture is from the perspective of a service flow. From the identity management perspective, we recommend reusing IETF works like WIMSE. This draft [I-D.draft-ni-wimse-ai-agent-identity-01] discusses WIMSE applicability to Agentic AI.¶
Figure 2 shows the diagram of provisioning and registration, which includes Agent Certificate Authority (ACA) and Agent Registry Service (ARS):¶
ACA (Agent Credential Authority): A trusted third party that issues and manages credentials for agents. Credential formats include but not limited to: X.509 certificates, identity tokens, etc.¶
ARS (Agent Registry Service): A system responsible for agent identity registration and discovery-matching.¶
+-------------------------------------------+ | | | +-----------------+ +------------------+ | | |Agent Credential | | Agent Registry | | | |Authority (ACA) | | Service(ARS) | | | +--------^--------+ +---------^--------+ | | | | | | ++---------------------++ | | || +----------+ || | | |+-----> Agent +----+| | | | +----------+ | | | | | | | | device/container | | | +-----------------------+ | | | +-------------------------------------------+¶
Figure 2. Diagram for Provisioning and Registration¶
Identity provisioning and management are the process of creating and assigning a verifiable digital identity to an agent.¶
Initial Trust Establishment: Initial trust can be established through one or more of the following trust anchors, including, but not limited to: a manufacturer-embedded immutable credential like an IDevID certificate; a hardware root of trust like a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or Hardware Security Module (HSM); identity documents like an AWS Instance Identity Document or an Azure Managed Service Identity token. This step verifies the agent's execution environment (device, container, etc.) as trustworthy, allows the device or container to join the network, thereby enabling secure operations for all subsequent steps.¶
Credential Request: During a credential request, the agent must provide multiple proofs of its legitimacy, could include, for example, but not limited to:¶
Proof of Possession (PoP): A Certificate Signing Request (CSR) or other PoP forms signed with the agent's private key, demonstrating that the agent holds the private key corresponding to the requested identity.¶
Remote Attestation Evidence or Result: A set of security-relevant claims about the Target Environment submitted to a RATS Verifier (could be the ACA), which reveals operational status, health, configuration, or construction.¶
AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM): A comprehensive inventory that details the agent's supply chain, including models, datasets, configurations, dependencies, and related infrastructure. This prevents the use of vulnerable AI components.¶
Provider Endorsement: A digital signature or credential from the Agent Provider, ensuring the agent originated from a trusted source.¶
Identity Binding: A cryptographic binding to a specific human user or an organizational role to specify on whose behalf the agent operates and its authorized scope.¶
Credential Issuance: The ACA validates proofs and requests from the above two steps, if passed, it issues an agent-specific credential that may include its owner or requester identity, capabilities, locator, acceptable validation methods for the ARS.¶
Credential Lifecycle Management: The ACA not only issues credentials but also defines and enforces revocation policies. These policies are triggered by specific events, such as a detected security compromise, the agent's scheduled decommissioning, or a key rotation.¶
AI Agents SHOULD NOT have direct access to secrets due to new threats like Prompt Injection. AI Agents SHOULD reuse secret management modules on the platform it operates on, for example, cloud secret managers or TEE/keystore/keychains on smart devices. Best practices like secret/credential generation, rotation and revocation apply. Agents SHOULD only obtain temporary access tokens or signed messages via a secure API or other kind of trusted intermediary. Guardrails also apply for general secret information exfiltration prevention.¶
After receiving a credential from the ACA, the agent then sends it to the ARS to authenticate itself and start the registration process.¶
Authentication: The ARS must verify the legitimacy of the credential submitted by the agent. It must be signed or otherwise endorsed by the ACA.¶
Registration: The ARS then checks if the information signed by the ACA, such as the agent's capabilities, exactly matches the registration request sent by the agent. Upon successful validation, the ARS assigns the agent a unique identifier and establishes an agent record that links the identifier to its attributes.¶
Record Management: This step automatically removes expired credentials and synchronizes with the ACA to ensure timely revocation of credentials, preventing the use of invalid or compromised credentials.¶
Agent onboarding differs between campus and cloud environments. On campus, agents use protocols like EAP-TLS for network access. In the cloud, the process involves injected sidecars, which register agents to the central service mesh registry automatically to enable communication and management.¶
After agent onboarding, the discovery process enables entities (e.g., a human user, an agent, etc.) to find and connect with registered agents.¶
Authentication: The ARS must authenticate the entity initiating the discovery request. The requester is required to present a valid identity credential.¶
Capability Filtering and Matching: The ARS performs dynamic filtering based on the requester's identity and query and returns only agent records relevant to the query, enforcing the principle of least privilege at the discovery layer.¶
Different domains may use distinct identifier schemas. Possible methods include:¶
Mutual TLS (mTLS) connection starts from the external requesting agent to the master agent. The master agent terminates the mTLS connection and parses the application layer requests. In this case, the master agent functions as an OAuth resource server, and manages internal task orchestration.¶
The master agent then verifies the identity of the requesting agent, and whether or not it has permission to the requested service or agent. Different authentication methods might be possible:¶
API keys¶
Username-password¶
Pre-shared secrets¶
Assertions (for example, JWT Authorization Grant[I-D.draft-ietf-oauth-identity-chaining-06])¶
which can even be combined with AND/OR logic. During this process, the master agent might be able to identify the caller endpoint type:¶
Since the agent may inherit its access rights from its owner or user, when authenticating requests, the validation might require integration of IAM systems for redirected verification.¶
Workflow Generation: Complex tasks often require multi-agent collaboration. The master agent receives, parses, and extracts the original job request from the external requesting agent, then creates sequential workflows or parallel calls. This requires the master agent to have information of all callable internal API assets, agent capabilities, etc.¶
Downscoping: If the master agent intends to use a workflow, it extracts the original caller's identity and authorization context, and initiates a new internal workflow. It should follow the current least privilege best practice of downscoping-Transaction Tokens as specified in [I-D.draft-tulshibagwale-oauth-transaction-tokens-05]. The access rights to each downstream workload decrease.¶
Agent-to-Agent Context: the Agent-to-Agent context and intent of the original requester must be preserved and propagated throughout the workflow to avoid authorization drift and context poisoning as specified in [I-D.draft-liu-oauth-a2a-profile-00].¶
Within a domain, there might exist different types of heterogeneous systems or legacy systems that require different authentication methods. They could be API endpoints, microservices, tools or databases. The exact authentication methods are determined by the service itself, for example,¶
As a result, the master agent also works as an intermediary credential manager that converts the formats, scopes, identity of the credential, bridging the gap between heterogeneous systems and platforms.¶
Examples include:¶
Static secrets (API keys) to be exchanged to short-lived, on demand credentials (identity tokens)¶
The above information can be used as rich context that allows zero trust access control. There are three additional aspects can be implemented to enhance the zero trust framework:¶
Remote Attestation Results: For the PEP at the master agent or the internal resource server, Remote attestation results could also be part of the inputs, which could include the following information:¶
Continuous Observability: The system should utilize OpenTelemetry (OTel) to track each call across agents, sending OTel's telemetry, which records call frequency, error rates, and behavioral anomalies, etc. to the PDP for real-time assessment.¶
Microsegmentation: Based on the telemetry data, PDP can issue software-defined security policies to PEP at the perimeter of each segment to enforce microsegmentation, in order to prevent lateral movement of security risks. Possible granularity of microsegmentation includes:¶
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TODO acknowledge.¶