Agent Control Protocol: Admission Control for Agent Actions
This addresses governance and security challenges for institutions deploying autonomous agents, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing RBAC and Zero Trust layers.
The paper tackles the problem of governing autonomous agents in B2B institutional environments by introducing Agent Control Protocol (ACP), a formal specification that enforces cryptographic admission checks for agent actions, resulting in a framework with 36 technical documents, a Go reference implementation, and over 62 verifiable requirements.
Agent Control Protocol (ACP) is a formal technical specification for governance of autonomous agents in B2B institutional environments. ACP is the admission control layer between agent intent and system state mutation: before any agent action reaches execution, it must pass a cryptographic admission check that validates identity, capability scope, delegation chain, and policy compliance simultaneously. ACP defines the mechanisms of cryptographic identity, capability-based authorization, deterministic risk evaluation, verifiable chained delegation, transitive revocation, and immutable auditing that a system must implement for autonomous agents to operate under explicit institutional control. ACP operates as an additional layer on top of RBAC and Zero Trust, without replacing them. The v1.13 specification comprises 36 technical documents organized into five conformance levels (L1-L5). It includes a Go reference implementation of 22 packages covering all L1-L4 capabilities, 51 signed conformance test vectors (Ed25519 + SHA-256), and an OpenAPI 3.1.0 specification for all HTTP endpoints. It defines more than 62 verifiable requirements, 12 prohibited behaviors, and the mechanisms for interoperability between institutions. Specification and implementation: https://github.com/chelof100/acp-framework-en