arXiv AI

SoK: Decentralized Agent Economic Infrastructure

arXiv AI
Sep 2

A Formal Analysis of Agent Payment Protocols

The paper presents a formal analysis of four agent payment protocols—x402, MPP, ACP, and AP2—using the Tamarin prover. By modeling each protocol’s roles, state, and trust assumptions, the authors verify 86 cases, reproducing 46 known results and uncovering 40 new formal-consistency findings. They further validate ten findings through implementation proofs of concept, SDK/schema witnesses, and executable traces, highlighting the importance of consistent delegated authorization across all protocol stages.

By Ke Jiang, Mohan Yu, Yuan Chang, Mohit Kumar Jangid, Jianyu Niu, Cong Wang, Yinqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Compositional Policy Violations: When Step-Level Compliance Fails In Agentic AI Workflows

The paper introduces the concept of Compositional Policy Violations (CPVs), where each step in an agentic AI workflow passes its individual compliance check, yet the overall execution violates higher‑level policies such as referral thresholds or authority limits. It categorizes CPVs into four types—Authority Creep, Threshold Laundering, Cumulative Sum Violation, and Context Collapse—and argues that the appropriate remedy depends on where the guarded quantity changes. To address this, the authors propose a provenance‑aware runtime architecture that evaluates policies over complete execution traces, recomputing guarded quantities from raw provenance rather than relying on step‑level outputs.

By Ashwini Kurady, Sri Sai Charith Grandhi, Rajesh Gupta, Sumit Mamoria
arXiv AI
Sep 15

AcquireBound: Runtime Authorization for Resources Acquired by AI Agents

AcquireBound is a runtime authorization framework that ensures AI agents can safely acquire and activate resources such as compute, credentials, and services. It quarantines acquired outputs, resolves their capabilities through authenticated evidence, and activates them only after verifying a manifest, provenance, and relational constraints. The system demonstrates strong safety properties, passing extensive benign and unsafe trace tests across multiple resource classes.

By Genliang Zhu