Protocol ensures proof of authority for secure transaction control
Provable Authority: A Protocol for Verifiable Authority Resolution and Control Across Human, Organizational, and Agentic Transactions
Cryptography and SecurityMultiagent Systems
Summary
It can be hard to prove that someone really has the right permission to complete a payment or transaction, especially when software agents act on behalf of humans or organizations. The authors describe the ChainIT Authority Protocol, which lets parties verify that a transaction is truly authorized based on current rules, policies, and limits. This protocol works across different payment types and supports both humans and AI agents acting with clear, verifiable authority. It helps prevent unauthorized actions even if a signature is valid but not properly permitted.
What this means in practice
- •For payment system engineers: Implement a unified layer to verify current organizational approval for transactions before execution on multiple payment rails.
- •For enterprise security teams: Use verifiable authority evidence to monitor and enforce human and AI agent permissions in financial workflows.
Authors
Jeremy Blackburn, Tim Hines, Matthew Koepp, Russell Lessard, Jason Patrick
Abstract
Payment systems authenticate users, devices, accounts, and cryptographic credentials, but a relying party, such as a counterparty, payment rail, marketplace, or autonomous agent runtime, generally cannot obtain compact, independently verifiable evidence that the party presenting one exact transaction holds current organizational authority to execute it under the applicable evidence, policy, budget, and approval state. Agentic commerce makes this gap operationally urgent: a software agent can produce a valid signature while acting outside its delegated purpose, after its sponsor's authority has changed, or on transaction details that differ from those a human approved. We describe the ChainIT Authority Protocol, a subject-neutral and rail-neutral pre-execution authority and evidence control plane. The protocol separates durable identity, a versioned organizational authority record (the Authority Resolution Pactvera), sourced evidence assertions, deterministic reason-coded policy predicates, and organization-configured dispositions; binds each decision and human approval to a canonical transaction digest; reserves capacity atomically so that limits hold under concurrency; and authorizes commit only through a single-use, sender-constrained Execution Authorization Credential consumed at the rail adapter, with append-only lifecycle evidence sealed after the terminal outcome. An Agent Subject Profile adds the workload registration, attested key hierarchy, and sovereignty boundary required when the acting subject is an AI agent, without introducing a separate authority concept. We specify the commit-time execution predicate and bounded-freshness status rules, give enforcement profiles for fiat (ACH, wire, card, instant payment) and stablecoin rails, and state residual risks and non-goals.