I-D Action: draft-cowles-ward-00.txt
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Internet-Draft draft-cowles-ward-00.txt is now available. Title: Write-once Append-only Receipt Digests (WARD): A Content-Free Hash-Chain Witnessing Protocol for Agentic AI Systems Author: Adam Cowles Name: draft-cowles-ward-00.txt Pages: 32 Dates: 2026-08-31 Abstract: Write-once Append-only Receipt Digests (WARD) defines a minimal, interoperable protocol for producing tamper-evident, content-free hash-chain witnesses over events from agentic AI systems. WARD observes events from companion protocols (Agent Envelope Exchange (AEE) messages, Agent Orchestration Control Layers (AOCL) decisions, and Verifiable Operations Ledger and Trace (VOLT) evidence records) and produces cryptographically linked receipts that prove specific events existed at specific points in time, without storing any event content. WARD entries record only source identifiers and payload hashes, never raw payloads, secrets, or personally identifiable information. Entries are linked via SHA-256 hash chains anchored by deterministic genesis hashes. Periodic checkpoints called "tips" may be signed with Ed25519 and published to external append-only stores (sinks) for independent verification. A meta-chain pattern allows witnessing tips from multiple sub-chains, providing deployment-wide integrity from a single verification point. The protocol is designed as a passive observer: witnessing never blocks, delays, or modifies the source event pipeline. WARD failures are logged but never disrupt AEE transport, AOCL decisions, or VOLT recording. This fire-and-forget integration model ensures that witnessing adds tamper-evidence guarantees without introducing operational risk. The IETF datatracker status page for this Internet-Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cowles-ward/ There is also an HTML version available at: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cowles-ward-00.html Internet-Drafts are also available by rsync at: rsync.ietf.org::internet-drafts _______________________________________________ I-D-Announce mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]