Internet of agents gets scalable trust system for identity and discovery
A Scalable Trust Discovery Architecture for the Internet of Agents
Cryptography and SecurityArtificial Intelligence
Summary
Many autonomous agents on the internet need to find and trust each other to work together well. Existing systems mostly focus on communication but don’t handle registering agents or verifying their identities at a large scale. The authors built a new architecture that organizes agents in layers and links each agent’s ID to a trusted registry, which helps everyone find and trust each other efficiently. Their prototype handled tens of thousands of registrations and discoveries per second with very low delays, showing this approach can work for huge numbers of agents.
What this means in practice
- •For iot platform developers: Integrate scalable and trusted agent identity and discovery into heterogeneous IoT device networks to enable secure autonomous interactions.
- •For cloud service operators: Deploy large-scale agent registries with low latency to support trusted service discovery for cloud-based AI agents.
Authors
Song Zhang, Jiankang Yao, Hongtao Li, Xiaojun Zhang, Xugang Shen, Xin Li, Yanbiao Li
Abstract
The Internet of Agents is expected to enable large numbers of autonomous agents to discover, verify, and collaborate with each other across heterogeneous platforms. However, current agent protocols mainly address tool invocation and inter-agent communication, leaving scalable agent registration, trustworthy identification, and capability-oriented discovery largely unresolved. To address this, this paper proposes a scalable trust discovery architecture for the Internet of Agents. The proposed architecture adopts a hierarchical and distributed design consisting of three layers: Agent Root for trusted registry governance, Agent Registry for agent registration and metadata publication, and Agent Resolver for distributed capability discovery and trust-aware resolution. The architecture further introduces a registry-suffix-anchored composite identity scheme, which binds an agent native identifier to a trusted registry suffix to generate a globally discoverable identity. It also incorporates a dual-certificate and multi-level authentication mechanism to strengthen identity trust among agents. We implement a prototype and evaluate it through large-scale agent registration and resolution experiments. The prototype achieves an average registration latency of 58ms and an average discovery latency of 25ms, and it supports more than 19,000 registration requests per second and more than 29,000 agent discovery requests per second. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, providing a practical approach toward scalable and identity-trusted agent ecosystems in the Internet of Agents.