Comment by niyikiza

Comment by niyikiza 3 days ago

2 replies

Right, the non-deterministic layer can't be the one deciding scope. That's the human's job at the root.

The LLM can request a narrower scope, but attenuation is monotonic and enforced cryptographically. You can't sign a delegation that exceeds what you were granted. TTL too: the warrant can't outlive its parent.

So yes, key management. But the pathological "Allow: *" has to originate from a human who signed it. That's the receipt you're left holding.

You're poking at the right edges though. UX for scope definition and revocation propagation are what we're working through now. We're building this at tenuo.dev if you want to dig in the spec or poke holes.

Muromec 3 days ago

>So yes, key management. But the pathological "Allow: *" has to originate from a human who signed it. That's the receipt you're left holding.

Sure, But I generally speaking want my agent to send out emails, so I explicitly grant email reading and email writing. I also want to it to pay for invoices but with some semantic condition.

Then I give it the instruction to do something that implicitly requires only email reading. At which point is the scope narrowed to align my explicit permissions granted before with implicit one for this operation? It's not really a problem cryptography is helpful for to solve.

Should it be the other way around maybe -- only read permission is granted first and then it has to request additional permissions for send?

  • niyikiza 3 days ago

    Yep ... that's exactly the direction. Think "default deny + step-up," not "grant everything up front."

    You keep a coarse cap (e.g. email read/write, invoice pay) but each task runs under a narrower, time-boxed warrant derived from that cap. Narrowing happens at the policy/UX layer (human or deterministic rules), not by the LLM. The LLM can request escalation ("need send"), but it only gets it via an explicit approval / rule.

    Crypto isn't deciding scope. It's enforcing monotonic attenuation, binding the grant to an agent key, and producing a receipt that the scope was explicitly approved.

    For a single-process agent this might be overkill. It matters more when warrants cross trust boundaries: third-party tools, sub-agents in different runtimes, external services. Offline verification means each hop can validate without calling home