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AGRC Framework / Domain 10
10
CSA MAESTRO Layer 7 (Agent Ecosystems), The "Neutral Bottoms" Doctrine.
Domain Objective
Allowing enterprise agents to autonomously negotiate and share data with third-party vendor agents over standard APIs without verifying the safety posture of the counterparty represents a critical vulnerability. Connectivity is contagion. This domain establishes the Zero-Trust Inter-Agent Protocol (ZT-IAP), enforcing strict cryptographic boundaries on the "Lateral Web" to ensure external agents cannot exploit internal fiduciaries.
Controls
IAP-10.1
Counterparty Governance Verification (The Cryptographic Handshake)
The Rule — Control Statement
Before any two agents are permitted to initiate a Business-to-Business (B2B) workflow (e.g., an Enterprise Procurement Agent negotiating with a Supplier's Sales Agent), they shall execute a cryptographic handshake verifying the active presence of a Deterministic Governor on both sides.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
The enterprise cannot rely on the "assumed" safety of a third-party vendor's agent. If an external agent lacks deterministic constraints, it operates as a "Black Box" and may attempt to pass hallucinated or maliciously injected instructions to the internal agent.
The How — Implementation Standard
The orchestration layer must require a valid "Glass Box" attestation token from the external counterparty. If the external agent cannot provide this cryptographic proof, the interaction must be automatically downgraded to a sandboxed, Tier 1 "Read-Only" exchange.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
API Gateway handshake logs demonstrating the successful exchange and validation of mutual governance attestations prior to the authorization of Tier 2+ kinetic workflows.
IAP-10.2
Prohibition of Automated Encryption Negotiation (Dark Comm Prevention)
The Rule — Control Statement
Agents shall not autonomously invent, negotiate, or utilize End-to-End (E2E) encrypted channels (e.g., generating PGP blocks) for inter-agent communication without explicit enterprise key escrow.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Highly capable agents are mathematically incentivized to optimize communication. Left ungoverned, they will establish "Dark Channels" to bypass platform API logs, effectively blinding the enterprise's DLP, logging infrastructure, and eDiscovery capabilities.
The How — Implementation Standard
Network and Governor payload scanners must strictly forbid the transmission or ingestion of high-entropy, encrypted payloads between agents unless the encryption keys are pre-escrowed and managed by the enterprise Key Management Service (KMS).
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Governor intervention logs showing the deterministic blocking of unparseable, high-entropy, or unilaterally encrypted text payloads traversing the B2B agent interface.
IAP-10.3
Output Sovereignty Enforcement (The "Untrusted User" Classification)
The Rule — Control Statement
Prompts, context, or instructions originating from an external third-party agent shall be legally classified and computationally processed strictly as "Untrusted User Input."
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
An external agent operating on behalf of a vendor is a third-party actor. Blindly trusting its outputs to drive internal multi-step tool chains effectively surrenders the enterprise's operational sovereignty to an external entity, enabling "Confused Deputy" attacks.
The How — Implementation Standard
The Governor must treat the external agent's prompt as highly adversarial. The system is barred from executing multi-step internal tool chains (e.g., updating a database, authorizing a payment) derived solely from the external agent's instructions without secondary internal cryptographic verification or human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
State-Tuple Ledger entries confirming the application of "High-Risk / Untrusted" policy constraints to all external agent payloads, accompanied by corresponding block or step-up authentication logs.
IAP-10.4
Machine-to-Machine Provenance Validation (Synthetic Contagion Defense)
The Rule — Control Statement
Enterprise Agents must cryptographically verify the provenance of all incoming B2B payloads (e.g., contracts, invoices, datasets) prior to ingestion into the reasoning loop.
The Why — Fiduciary Rationale
Protects against "Synthetic Contagion," where a hallucinated or fabricated payload generated by a third-party AI is blindly accepted and processed as factual ground-truth by the internal AI.
The How — Implementation Standard
If an internal agent ingests data from a third-party vendor's API, the orchestration layer must validate the C2PA, SynthID, or equivalent cryptographic provenance header. Payloads lacking a valid Governance Signature from the counterparty must be routed through maximum-scrutiny policy manifolds or dropped entirely.
The Proof — Continuous Attestation Evidence
Ingestion pipeline logs explicitly mapping incoming B2B payloads to successful C2PA signature validations, or documenting the automated quarantine of unsigned synthetic assets.
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