sm-dat — Delegated Authority Token

The portable, cryptographically signed grant a human gives an agent — what it's allowed to do, for how long, under what limits. Runtime-agnostic, vendor-neutral, MIT-licensed.

ARP records what an agent did. DAT records what an agent was allowed to do. Together they answer the two halves of every accountability question — "did this happen?" (ARP) and "was it authorized?" (DAT). DAT is the missing first half: ARP receipts ship today and already carry an authority_chain field waiting for the grants that fill it.

A DAT is signed by the principal's key, not the agent's — so it is a non-repudiable statement by the human: "I permitted this, within these bounds."

from sm_arp import Identity, build_action
from sm_dat import (LedgerContext, StaticRevocationList, build_grant, sign_grant,
                    verify_grant, check_attenuation)

principal, agent = Identity.generate(), Identity.generate()

grant = sign_grant(principal, build_grant(
    grantee_did=agent.did,
    action_categories=["purchase"],
    stateless={"amount_currency": "USD", "amount_cents_per_action_max": 5000,
               "counterparty_allowlist": ["domain:amctheatres.com"]},
    stateful={"amount_cents_per_period_max": 50000, "period": "month"},
    not_before="2026-04-01T00:00:00Z",
    not_after="2026-06-30T23:59:59Z",
    revocation={"list_url": "https://principal.example/revocations.json"},
    human_summary="Buy movie tickets, ≤$50/mo, AMC only.",
))

buy = build_action(category="purchase", human_summary="two tickets",
                   amount_cents=3000, currency="USD",
                   counterparty_label="domain:amctheatres.com")

ledger = LedgerContext.from_receipts([], grant["grant_id"])   # the agent's prior receipts
live = StaticRevocationList([], fetched_at="2026-04-10T19:00:00Z")

v = verify_grant(grant, buy, "2026-04-10T19:00:00Z", agent_did=agent.did,
                 ledger_context=ledger, revocation_checker=live)
print(v.status, v.reason)          # SATISFIED / VIOLATED / INDETERMINATE

The full version of this — over-cap, the third outcome, an actual revocation, and a delegation attenuation check — is examples/quickstart.py, and it runs (real output, 2026-07-13):

in-bounds    : SATISFIED ok
over cap     : VIOLATED amount_cap_exceeded
no checker   : INDETERMINATE revocation_unknown
revoked      : VIOLATED revoked
attenuation  : SATISFIED

(Two semantics worth noticing there: the revocation gate runs only for grants that declare a revocation source — and once declared, verifying without a checker is INDETERMINATE, never a silent pass. And a child grant that omits a cap its parent has is a widening — check_attenuation rejects it.)

The one decision that defines this library

Authorization checks have three outcomes, not two: SATISFIED, VIOLATED, and INDETERMINATE. A per-period budget cap ("≤$50/month") cannot be decided from one action alone — the verifier must sum it against prior actions. If it lacks that ledger, sm-dat returns INDETERMINATE(accounting_required) — it never silently passes a guarantee it could not recompute. That "recompute, don't trust" discipline is inherited straight from sm-parc.

Demo

An interactive page recomputes the verdict in the browser (a faithful port of verify_grant) — pick a scenario, watch the three-valued verdict and the decision trace update live. Try it at demodat.stellarminds.ai. The three states:

In scope → SATISFIED

Over the per-action cap → VIOLATED(amount_cap_exceeded) — the real reason, not a bare "no":

A per-period budget with no ledger supplied → INDETERMINATE(accounting_required) — it refuses to guess a budget it cannot compute:

Where it sits

sm-oversight is synchronous per-action approval; sm-dat is standing autonomous authorization granted ahead of time. sm-airlock is the agent's sandbox; sm-dat is the principal's leash. No overlap.

Downstream, the dissociation-receipt suite consumes sm-dat as its authority leg: sm-dissociation-receipt's [arp] extra pins this package at an exact git SHA and wraps verify_authority_chain behind its make_authority_adapter — "was this principal entitled to order a memory exclusion?" is answered by a DAT grant.

Status

• WHITEPAPER.md — the motivation, design axioms, and what's novel: the three-valued post-hoc recomputable verdict, receipt-anchored verification, and the accounting_required budget cap that refuses to guess.
• SPEC.md — the normative draft: envelope, scope model, verification procedure, attenuation, revocation, verifier obligations, conformance corpus plan.
• Promoted from sm-arp's dat-companion.md sketch. Targets dat/0.1 published parallel to ARP v0.2; dat/1.0 and ARP v1.0 in lockstep.

Depends on sm-arp for identity, canonicalization, signatures, and the Agency Log — it never re-implements crypto.

License

MIT © 2026 StellarMinds. See LICENSE.

Part of the NANDA ecosystem · built by StellarMinds.