eatp 0.2.0

Enterprise Agent Trust Protocol SDK — cryptographic trust chains, delegation, and verification for AI agent systems

EATP -- Enterprise Agent Trust Protocol

Cryptographic trust chains, delegation, and verification for AI agent systems.

A public good by the Terrene Foundation -- open infrastructure for AI trust, released under the Apache 2.0 license.

What is EATP?

As AI agents act on behalf of humans -- reading databases, calling APIs, delegating work to other agents -- there is no standard way to answer: Who authorized this agent? What can it do? Who is responsible when things go wrong?

EATP solves this with cryptographic trust chains. Every agent carries a signed, verifiable record of who authorized it, what capabilities it has, what constraints limit its behavior, and what actions it has taken. Trust is established once, delegated with constraint tightening, verified before every action, and audited immutably.

Quick Start

import asyncio
from eatp import TrustOperations, TrustKeyManager, CapabilityRequest
from eatp.chain import AuthorityType, CapabilityType
from eatp.crypto import generate_keypair
from eatp.store.memory import InMemoryTrustStore
from eatp.authority import OrganizationalAuthority, AuthorityPermission

async def main():
    # Setup
    store = InMemoryTrustStore()
    await store.initialize()
    key_mgr = TrustKeyManager()
    priv_key, pub_key = generate_keypair()
    key_mgr.register_key("key-org", priv_key)

    # Register authority
    authority = OrganizationalAuthority(
        id="org-acme", name="ACME Corp",
        authority_type=AuthorityType.ORGANIZATION,
        public_key=pub_key, signing_key_id="key-org",
        permissions=[AuthorityPermission.CREATE_AGENTS],
    )

    # Simple in-memory registry
    class Registry:
        async def initialize(self): pass
        async def get_authority(self, aid, include_inactive=False):
            return authority

    # Create TrustOperations
    ops = TrustOperations(
        authority_registry=Registry(),
        key_manager=key_mgr,
        trust_store=store,
    )

    # ESTABLISH trust
    chain = await ops.establish(
        agent_id="agent-001",
        authority_id="org-acme",
        capabilities=[
            CapabilityRequest(capability="analyze_data", capability_type=CapabilityType.ACTION),
        ],
    )

    # VERIFY before acting
    result = await ops.verify(agent_id="agent-001", action="analyze_data")
    print(f"Verified: {result.valid}")  # True

asyncio.run(main())

Four Operations

EATP defines four operations that form the complete lifecycle of agent trust:

ESTABLISH -- Create initial trust

chain = await ops.establish(
    agent_id="agent-001",
    authority_id="org-acme",
    capabilities=[
        CapabilityRequest(capability="analyze_data", capability_type=CapabilityType.ACTION),
        CapabilityRequest(capability="read_reports", capability_type=CapabilityType.ACCESS),
    ],
    constraints=["read_only", "business_hours_only"],
)

An organizational authority (company, department, individual) creates a signed genesis record for an agent, granting specific capabilities under specific constraints.

DELEGATE -- Transfer trust with tightening

delegation = await ops.delegate(
    delegator_id="agent-001",
    delegatee_id="agent-002",
    task_id="task-quarterly-report",
    capabilities=["analyze_data"],
    additional_constraints=["no_pii_export"],
)

An agent can delegate a subset of its capabilities to another agent. Constraints can only be tightened, never loosened -- the delegatee can never do more than the delegator.

VERIFY -- Validate before every action

result = await ops.verify(agent_id="agent-001", action="analyze_data")
if result.valid:
    # Proceed with action
    ...

Called before every agent action. Three verification levels trade off speed for thoroughness:

• QUICK (~1ms): Hash and expiration check
• STANDARD (~5ms): Capability and constraint validation
• FULL (~50ms): Cryptographic signature verification of the entire chain

AUDIT -- Immutable action log

from eatp.chain import ActionResult

anchor = await ops.audit(
    agent_id="agent-001",
    action="analyze_data",
    resource="finance_db",
    result=ActionResult.SUCCESS,
)

Every action is recorded in a signed, hash-linked audit trail. Each audit anchor includes the trust chain hash at time of action, enabling tamper detection.

Features

Core Trust

• Ed25519 cryptography via PyNaCl -- signing, verification, key generation
• Trust Lineage Chains -- 5-element structure (genesis, capabilities, delegations, constraints, audit anchors)
• Trust postures -- 5-level state machine (DELEGATED, CONTINUOUS_INSIGHT, SHARED_PLANNING, SUPERVISED, PSEUDO_AGENT)
• Trust scoring -- Composite 0-100 score across chain completeness, delegation depth, constraint coverage, posture, recency

Constraint System

Five constraint dimensions with six built-in templates:

Dimension	Controls
Scope	Allowed actions, visibility level
Financial	Spend limits, daily caps, commerce types
Temporal	Business hours, market hours, duration limits
Communication	Endpoint allowlists, rate limits, external access
Data Access	Classification ceiling, read-only mode, PII access

Templates: governance, finance, community, standards, audit, minimal

from eatp.templates import get_template, customize_template

# Load a built-in template
finance_constraints = get_template("finance")

# Customize it
custom = customize_template("finance", {"financial": {"max_amount": 50000}})

Enforcement

• StrictEnforcer -- Production mode. Blocks unauthorized actions, holds for human review.
• ShadowEnforcer -- Observation mode. Logs what would be blocked without interrupting.
• Decorators -- 3-line integration for any async function.

from eatp.enforce import verified, audited, shadow

@verified(agent_id="agent-001", action="read_data")
async def read_sensitive_data(query: str) -> dict:
    return await db.execute(query)

Interoperability

EATP trust chains can be exported to and imported from industry standards:

Format	Module	Use Case
JWT (RFC 7519)	eatp.interop.jwt	API authentication, bearer tokens
W3C Verifiable Credentials	eatp.interop.w3c_vc	Cross-organization trust
DID (Decentralized Identifiers)	eatp.interop.did	Agent identity
UCAN v0.10.0	eatp.interop.ucan	Decentralized delegation
SD-JWT	eatp.interop.sd_jwt	Selective disclosure
Biscuit	eatp.interop.biscuit	Attenuation tokens

MCP Server

EATP ships an MCP server for direct integration with AI agent frameworks. Agents can establish trust, verify capabilities, and record audit entries through standard MCP tool calls.

CLI

The eatp command provides full trust lifecycle management:

Command	Description
eatp init	Create authority keypair and genesis record
eatp establish	Establish trust for a new agent
eatp delegate	Delegate capabilities to another agent
eatp verify	Verify an agent's trust for an action
eatp revoke	Revoke an agent's trust or delegation
eatp status	Show agent trust chain status
eatp audit	Query the audit trail
eatp export	Export trust chain (JSON, JWT)
eatp verify-chain	Cryptographically verify an entire chain
eatp version	Show SDK version

# Initialize an authority
eatp init --name "Acme Corp" --type organization

# Establish trust for an agent
eatp establish --authority auth-abc123 --agent agent-001 --capabilities analyze_data,read_reports

# Verify before acting
eatp verify --agent agent-001 --action analyze_data

Installation

pip install eatp

Optional extras:

pip install eatp[postgres]   # PostgreSQL-backed trust store
pip install eatp[dev]        # Development tools (pytest, mypy, ruff)

Requires Python 3.11+.

Architecture

An EATP Trust Lineage Chain contains five elements:

TrustLineageChain
  |-- GenesisRecord          Who authorized this agent to exist?
  |-- CapabilityAttestation  What can this agent do?
  |-- DelegationRecord       Who delegated work to this agent?
  |-- ConstraintEnvelope     What limits apply?
  |-- AuditAnchor            What has this agent done?

Every element is cryptographically signed. The chain forms a tamper-evident structure: modifying any element invalidates the chain hash, and FULL verification checks every signature against the issuing authority's public key.

Delegation is monotonically constraining -- each delegation can only tighten constraints, never loosen them. This guarantees that delegated agents can never exceed the permissions of their delegators, no matter how deep the chain.

Comparison with Alternatives

	EATP	X.509	SPIFFE	UCAN	Biscuit
Designed for AI agents	Yes	No	No	Partial	No
Delegation with constraint tightening	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Action-level audit trail	Yes	No	No	No	No
Trust scoring and postures	Yes	No	No	No	No
Interop with existing standards	JWT, W3C VC, DID, UCAN, SD-JWT, Biscuit	N/A	X.509	JWT	N/A
Human-origin traceability	Yes	No	No	No	No
Open source	Apache 2.0	Various	Apache 2.0	Various	Apache 2.0

EATP is not a replacement for transport-layer security (TLS/mTLS) or identity providers. It operates at the authorization and accountability layer, answering what an agent is allowed to do and recording what it actually did.

Links

• Terrene Foundation
• EATP Specification
• API Documentation
• Apache 2.0 License

Contributing

EATP is open infrastructure maintained by the Terrene Foundation. Contributions are welcome.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feat/your-feature)
3. Write tests for your changes
4. Ensure all tests pass (pytest)
5. Submit a pull request

Please follow conventional commits for commit messages.

For bug reports and feature requests, open an issue on GitHub.