Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes
2026-06-18 • Cryptography and Security
Cryptography and SecurityArtificial IntelligenceDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduce the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a system that ensures only trusted and certified actions can change important parts of cloud-based agent systems. They explain how SEB checks certificates, enforces rules at the exact moment changes happen, and keeps detailed records for security and auditing. The system separates proposing a change, approving it, and actually executing it to make authority revocable and secure. They tested their prototype on AWS and Kubernetes, measuring how well it performs and handles errors.
Autonomous agentsCertificate-based authorizationRuntime enforcementCloud infrastructureAccess controlMutation authorityKubernetesAWSRevocationAuditing
Authors
Jun He, Deying Yu
Abstract
Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.