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AGRC Framework / Domain 1
01
OWASP ASI03 (Identity & Privilege Abuse), MITRE ATLAS Privilege Escalation, SOC 2 CC6 (Logical Access).
Domain Objective
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a software feature operated by a human; it is a synthetic fiduciary acting on behalf of the enterprise. The operational baseline mandates Cryptographic Zero-Trust for all cognitive agents, explicitly preventing the assignment of broad, human-level privileges to Non-Human Identities (NHIs).
Controls
AC-1.1
Cryptographic Separation of Principal and Agent
The Rule — Control Statement
The enterprise shall provision every autonomous agent with a unique, cryptographic Non-Human Identity (NHI) that is structurally decoupled from the human operator invoking it.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
The historical practice of allowing agents to inherit human session tokens obfuscates the chain of custody and allows adversarial actors to execute lateral movement under the guise of an authorized human user.
The How — Implementation Standard
If a human principal tasks an agent to execute an action, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) system must independently authenticate both the principal's authorization to request the action and the agent's distinct authorization to execute it.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Identity Provider (IdP) logs demonstrating parallel, dual-token authentication events (e.g., via SPIFFE/SPIRE workloads) for 100% of agent-initiated infrastructure requests.
AC-1.2
Ephemeral Just-In-Time (JIT) Credentialing
The Rule — Control Statement
Agentic orchestration logic shall not utilize, hold, or store hard-coded or static API keys.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Mitigates the blast radius of a compromised agent by ensuring that harvested credentials mathematically expire before they can be weaponized for lateral movement or data exfiltration.
The How — Implementation Standard
All Agent-to-Machine communications must be governed by Just-In-Time (JIT), ephemeral access tokens constrained to a micro-window (e.g., maximum 15 minutes) or tied directly to task completion.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Security Token Service (STS) telemetry correlated with State-Tuple Ledger entries, proving token expiration immediately following the Governor's verified task completion.
AC-1.3
Cryptographic Progressive Autonomy (Earned RBAC)
The Rule — Control Statement
Agent permissions must be structured sequentially on an "Earned Autonomy" principle, dynamically enforced by mathematically verified access boundaries.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Ensures that an agent cannot spontaneously escalate from exploratory actions to kinetic operations without triggering a defined governance checkpoint.
The How — Implementation Standard
Tier 1 (Read-Only RAG), Tier 2 (Internal Tool Execution via MCP), and Tier 3 (External Financial/Infrastructure APIs) must be rigidly segregated. Transitioning an agent between privilege tiers requires explicit, cryptographic attestation from the Governor verifying the semantic safety of the intent vector.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
State-Tuple Ledger entries validating the Governor's approval hash for any IAM Tier transition event.
AC-1.4
Autonomous Escalation Boundaries (Sybil Defense)
The Rule — Control Statement
The IAM environment shall explicitly deny agents the permission to provision net-new sub-agents autonomously or alter their own IAM policies.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Prevents infinite recursive spawning (Sybil attacks) resulting in resource exhaustion ("Denial of Wallet") or runaway compute hijacking by state-sponsored actors.
The How — Implementation Standard
"Agent Swarming" architectures must be physically hard-capped (e.g., maximum depth of 3 child agents) at the orchestration layer, completely independent of the LLM's reasoning loop.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Active IAM deny-policies on agent execution roles for iam:CreateRole or sts:AssumeRole; orchestration configurations proving hard-capped concurrent thread limits.
AC-1.5
Workload-Bound Generation (Reverse Impersonation Defense)
The Rule — Control Statement
NHI token generation must be strictly bound to the hardware/container workload and logically unextractable by human administrators.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Defends against insider threats or attackers harvesting agent credentials to execute malicious actions under the guise of an "AI Hallucination."
The How — Implementation Standard
The system must deterministically revoke tokens that exhibit "human speed" latency (e.g., UI typing/clicking) or originate from unauthorized network perimeters (e.g., corporate VPNs vs. backend orchestration servers).
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Network and behavioral telemetry logs proving continuous origin-authentication of the agent's token, paired with automated revocation logs for anomalies.
AC-1.6
HRIS-Coupled Lifecycle Deprovisioning
The Rule — Control Statement
The lifecycle of a cognitive agent must be cryptographically tethered to the human principal or project sponsor.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Prevents the existence of orphaned, highly privileged "Zombie Agents" operating on outdated logic or susceptible to hijacking post-termination.
The How — Implementation Standard
Upon termination, department transfer, or credential-freeze of the human principal, the IAM system must autonomously execute a cascading revocation of all downstream NHI tokens, active looping processes, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections associated with that agent.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Automated substantive testing scripts linking Human Resources Information System (HRIS) termination timestamps to immediate NHI certificate revocation (delta < 5 minutes).
AC-1.7
Telemetric Credential Masking
The Rule — Control Statement
Ephemeral credentials generated, retrieved, or utilized by an agent must be mathematically masked in all telemetry and observability pipelines.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Prevents the inadvertent leakage of high-privilege STS tokens or API keys into standard IT monitoring tools, which are frequent targets for insider threat harvesting.
The How — Implementation Standard
The orchestration layer must filter and cryptographically redact high-entropy strings before data is committed to human-readable logs, SIEMs, or APM dashboards (e.g., Datadog, Splunk).
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) scans across observability platforms verifying the absolute absence of plaintext JIT credentials.
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