Focus Area: Agent-to-agent identity verification, credential validation, and trust-establishment workflows used to confirm agent authenticity, permissions, and reliability before autonomous interaction.
This ontology provides citation-quality definitions for 15 foundational terms, backed by authoritative sources from standards bodies (NIST, W3C, IETF, OASIS, ISO) and peer-reviewed research.
15
Technical Terms
75%+
Tier-1 Sources
V1.72
Pipeline Version
Technical Glossary
AGT001Agent Passport
An Agent Passport is a portable identity package that lets one agent present stable identifiers, keys, and verifiable claims to another agent before work begins. It turns introduction into a machine-checkable exchange instead of a blind trust assumption.
A Verifier Handshake is the opening verification sequence in which two agents exchange enough signed metadata to decide whether deeper interaction should continue. Its purpose is to establish provenance, supported methods, and minimum trust posture before task execution.
A Credential Freshness Window defines how recent an attestation or proof must be for an agent to treat it as operationally reliable. It prevents stale but syntactically valid claims from being reused long after the underlying state changed.
A Proof-Carrying Request is an API or message invocation that includes the cryptographic evidence needed to validate the sender at the moment of use. Instead of trusting a session alone, the request carries verifiable proof alongside the action being asked for.
A Capability Assertion Chain links together the claims showing what an agent is allowed to do, who issued those claims, and what delegation path produced them. This matters when execution rights are layered across principals, tools, and policy systems.
A Trust Bootstrap Token is a minimal initial token or credential used to start verification when two agents have no pre-existing relationship. It does not finalize trust by itself, but it gives both sides enough ground to request stronger proof.
A Reciprocal Assurance Check means both agents evaluate one another rather than assuming only the requester must be verified. In autonomous systems, bidirectional verification reduces asymmetric trust and lowers the chance of one-sided impersonation.
Policy-Gated Admission is the decision point where an agent is allowed into a workflow only after identity, entitlement, and context checks pass policy evaluation. Verification becomes operationally meaningful only when tied to enforcement.
A Replay-Resistant Exchange is structured so that old valid messages cannot simply be copied and reused to gain access later. Nonces, signatures, time bounds, and sender-constrained proofs all contribute to this property.
A Delegated Verifier Path is a chain in which one service performs verification on behalf of another but preserves enough evidence for downstream trust decisions. It is useful when orchestration layers mediate between many agents and many tools.
A Verifiable Service Endpoint is a published endpoint whose ownership and authorization context can be checked rather than merely resolved. It binds the place an agent connects to with the identity assertions that explain why that endpoint should be trusted.
An Agent Reputation Attestation is a signed statement about past behavior, reliability, or policy compliance that another agent can inspect as part of trust establishment. It should be treated as contextual evidence, not as a substitute for direct proof.
A Revocation-Aware Session is a long-running interaction that keeps checking whether previously accepted credentials or keys are still valid. It prevents trust from freezing at session start when the underlying authorization state may change midstream.
Cross-Realm Trust Bridging is the verification process used when agents from different administrative or identity domains need to cooperate. The bridge must preserve meaning across schemas, issuers, policies, and endpoint conventions.
A Decision Trace Envelope is the retained record showing what proofs, policies, and checks led an agent to accept or reject another agent. It makes trust decisions auditable instead of disappearing into opaque runtime behavior.