KYA: A Framework-Agnostic Trust Layer for Autonomous Systems with Verifiable Provenance and Hierarchical Policy Composition

arXiv:2605.25376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Observability tells operators when an agent is slow. KYA tells operators when an agent is wrong, drifting, leaking, or quietly going rogue. We present KYA (Know Your Agents), an open-source trust and governance layer for autonomous systems composed of five primitives: (1) a four-gate inbound apply pipeline composing Ed25519 signature verification with multi-anchor pinning, persist-time expiry, only-tighten composition, and operator-approval-as-default; (2) an only-tighten composition algebra over a three-channel multi-tenant hierarchy (platform default,tenant override, signed external recommendation); (3) KYP -- Know Your Principal, a schema-level unification of trust scoring across human users, AI agents, and service accounts; (4) auditable interaction-multiplier amplification over an AIVSS-shaped additive baseline, with bounded asymmetric per-interaction multipliers carrying stable audit codes; and (5) two-axis delegation attribution combining a static observation-gated delegation-trust premium with zero-config runtime orchestrator-blame at three SDK hook surfaces. KYA is framework-agnostic across 22 agent frameworks. The pure-function scorer runs sub-millisecond at p99 and the system sustains ~1,800 ops/sec at 20 concurrent workers with HMAC chain integrity preserved end-to-end. The four-gate inbound apply pipeline rejects forged, expired, loosening, and unapproved recommendations on every trial (1,200 / 1,200) with sub-millisecond p99 latency on SQLite. KYA detects 89% of 1,200 adversarial probes from PyRIT and Garak, including the recently-published topology-guided multi-agent attack. The system is available under Apache 2.0 as the veldt-kya package on PyPI (release candidate at submission time; stable v0.1.0 forthcoming)

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-05-26