A Layered Requirements Mapping for Cross-Organization Agent Delegation

1.1. Assumptions and Verdict Discipline

The no-shared-operator assumption applies throughout. Each verdict states what holds offline and unconditionally versus what depends on a named assumption, following the conditional form requested in the originating thread. Three entries are not clean passes for the chain layer and are marked as such; deployments should read a "met" verdict together with its stated condition, never without it.¶

2.1. Summary Table

"Chain" is the delegation layer ([I-D.rampalli-pedigree]). "Root" is the human-authorization layer ([I-D.schrock-human-authorization-binding], [I-D.schrock-ep-action-evidence-graph]). The composition column states how the layers relate on that row.¶

The R5 and R4 cells reflect corrections agreed on-list on 2026-07-05: the named-human and quorum property is native to the receipt and quorum artifacts themselves, with binding requirement B2 tying the artifact's action binding to the host record; and R4's composition cell carries the constructive composed-stack line alongside the shared-gap statement.¶

2.2. Row Notes

The full per-layer mappings live in the originating thread; these notes carry only what the one-line verdicts compress too much.¶

R1, recursive attenuation:

The chain meets it from conveyed material alone: per-hop scope subsetting and mandate narrowing are re-checked at verification, not only at mint, and the verifier re-verifies every parent token. The condition is inline conveyance of parents. The root layer does not narrow scope, and should not: it names the human and binds the action. A division of labor, not a gap.¶

R2, cross-organizational verification:

Both layers give the same answer in different vocabulary: the trust assumption does not disappear, it concentrates at one pinned root. For the chain that is the originating organization's anchor (self-certifying identifiers remove it for intermediate hops); for the root layer it is the discipline that a binding from an unpinned issuer must not be accepted.¶

R4, proof of possession:

The one row where the layers do not cover each other: neither proves possession. The chain binds the holder's key and defers the presentation-time proof to the transport (a WPT [I-D.ietf-wimse-s2s-protocol], HTTP message signatures [RFC9421], or a context-bound per-request token); the root layer addresses evidence binding, not possession. A deployment composing both layers still needs a possession-proving transport underneath, which is why the transport profile holds a first-class seat in the composition model of Section 3.¶

R5, principal binding and invariance:

The mirror image of R1. The root layer is native here: an accountable named human, or a quorum, signs, and the artifact's action binding must agree with the host record. The chain's contribution is preservation: re-verification of every hop means an intermediary cannot alter the principal without breaking a signature it cannot forge. The root proves who authorized; the chain proves nobody swapped them en route.¶

R7, authentic bounded-staleness revocation:

On the chain side, staleness is bounded by lifetime, offline and unconditionally; event-driven cascade revocation rides a channel assumption; and fail-closed behavior on stale revocation data is an admitted gap, scheduled for the next PEDIGREE revision. On the root side the discipline is already normative: freshness bounds are policy inputs, the verdict set is closed with precedence unverifiable over conflicted over stale over missing_evidence over admissible, and the absence of evidence is insufficient rather than a default. The root layer closes, by construction, exactly the gap the chain layer names. When the chain layer states the same rule normatively, this row becomes two independent enforcements of one rule rather than one layer covering for the other.¶

R8, tamper-evident composable audit:

The chain proves scope: every hop is a signed object, and post-execution composition binds per-action authorization and provenance references into SCITT Agent Action Capsules ([I-D.rampalli-scitt-capsule-provenance-binding]), with the anchored tier assuming a transparency service. The evidence layer proves the act: a content-addressed graph in which an edge the bytes do not back poisons the verdict, plus a signed Reliance Result that adds accountability, never authority. They join by digest equality.¶

R3, R6, R9:

As the table states; the per-layer mappings in the originating thread carry the detail.¶

3.1. The Delegation-Chain Row, Stated Explicitly

The mapping-table rules of [I-D.bu-agentproto-security-principal-binding] require that an inherited mechanism state its dependency and failure behavior before it counts as a guarantee. The delegation-chain row, with PEDIGREE as the supplier, in those terms:¶

Claim:

authority for this exact operation was conveyed from the root principal and narrowed at every hop; the terminal scope covers the operation.¶

Carrier:

the per-hop delegation tokens, conveyed inline with the request.¶

Verifier and rule:

the relying party, offline: re-verify each hop's signature against its issuer key, check per-hop scope subsetting and mandate narrowing, take effective expiry as the minimum over hops, and require the operator-ceiling conjunct.¶

Binding and freshness:

bound to the root principal and to the holder's key; staleness bounded by chain lifetime; cascade revocation rides a Shared Signals / CAEP-class channel where one exists.¶

Failure behavior:

any hop signature failure, subset violation, or expiry fails the request as an authorization failure, independently of key possession and of human authorization. A revocation feed older than the configured bound must fail closed; making that normative is a scheduled PEDIGREE revision item.¶

Dependency:

the originating organization's trust anchor (root only; intermediate hops use self-certifying identifiers), inline conveyance of parent tokens, and the possession row at the transport for holder proof.¶

Stated that way, nothing is inherited implicitly: the chain row supplies the authority path and its attenuation, and it explicitly depends on the possession row rather than assuming it.¶

3.2. The Human-Authorization Row, Stated by Its Supplier

Iman Schrock contributed the human-authorization row on-list on 2026-07-05, stated in the same template terms as the chain row. It is included here with only editorial normalization.¶

Claim:

a named, accountable human, or an M-of-N quorum of distinct humans, optionally ordered, authorized this exact operation before execution; asserted as human authority, not organizational policy, and the row names which.¶

Carrier:

the authorization receipt (EP-RECEIPT-v1, or EP-QUORUM-v1 for multi-party), a self-contained signed JSON artifact conveyed inline or referenced by digest from the host record.¶

Verifier and rule:

the relying party, offline, with no account: Ed25519 over the canonical action bytes (JCS [RFC8785]) against a pinned issuer key; for a quorum, threshold met by distinct principals over the same digest, with order enforced when declared. Verified and accepted remain separate results, and neither implies sufficiency.¶

Binding and freshness:

bound to the action digest (the shared join key; digest equality is a join key, never authorization) and to the named principal, with a validity window on the artifact. One-time use is enforcement-point state, not offline-verifiable; the state holder is named in the dependency, so the offline part and the enforcement part stay visible separately.¶

Failure behavior:

missing, invalid, stale, replayed, or out-of-scope evidence fails the request as a human-authorization failure, independently of key possession and of chain attenuation. The refusal is machine-readable (an HTTP 428 challenge [RFC6585] naming the missing evidence), so a refusal is itself evidence, not silence.¶

Dependency:

relying-party key pinning (a binding from an unpinned issuer must not be accepted); an enforcement point for one-time consumption, deployed by the resource owner; and holder proof at presentation rides the possession row at the transport, the same shared dependency recorded at R4. The row makes no possession claim of its own.¶

Evidence:

public vectors, positive and negative (receipt and quorum suites in the EP reference repository), reproducible with the ep-verify tool.¶

One asymmetry, stated rather than papered over: the chain row of Section 3.1 does not yet cite public evidence vectors, and its evidence entry is open until vectors are published. An evidence column is only useful if an empty cell is allowed to say so.¶

3.3. Template Compatibility

Each row of Table 1 and each input class above is kept expressible in the mapping-table template of [I-D.bu-agentproto-security-principal-binding] (claim, carrier, verifier and rule, binding and freshness, failure behavior, dependency, evidence reference). If the working group settles on that shared shape for comparative tables, moving this document into it is a re-rendering rather than a rewrite.¶