RESEARCH PROGRAMME

Authority is the missing evidence layer.

Verimand’s thesis is that autonomous systems need a first-class, machine-verifiable representation of delegated organisational authority—separate from identity, policy and model reasoning.

Research thesis

RESEARCH QUESTION

How can consequential autonomous action remain bounded, conserved, current and auditable across organisational delegation?

THE GAP

Authentication proves identity.
Policy evaluates rules.
Neither proves a current chain of authority.

An agent can be authenticated and policy-compliant while still lacking a valid organisational mandate for one exact action. VAGP treats that provenance as its own security object.

PRIOR-ART MAP

01Capability systems

Demonstrate unforgeable, attenuable authority tokens; VAGP adds explicit organisational graph provenance and lifecycle semantics.

02IAM and workload identity

Strongly establish principals and credentials; they do not by themselves model why delegated organisational authority exists.

03Policy engines

Evaluate rules over inputs; VAGP supplies a distinct authority result that policy may consume but cannot silently invent.

04Agent governance

Often focuses on model behaviour, risk and oversight. VAGP focuses on deterministic execution authority at the trust boundary.

WORKING HYPOTHESES

Authority can be conserved through monotonic delegation.

Every edge can be tested for narrower-or-equal semantics, including finite budget lineage that cannot be duplicated among descendants.

Current authority requires temporal evidence.

Validity, lifecycle status and observation freshness are explicit. A historic witness cannot silently become a current one.

Verification belongs near consequence.

Exact resource-side verification limits semantic drift and lets the protected system reject stale, mismatched or replayed execution attempts.

OPEN QUESTIONS

UNDER ACTIVE DESIGN

Portable evidence

Canonicalisation, signatures, key sovereignty, durable replay state and Authority Receipts require explicit future protocol decisions.

VAGP evolution · planned

BOUNDARY CONDITION

Never delegate to probability

Models may help interpret and recommend. They must not become the final authority evaluator for a consequential action.

Deterministic trust boundary