Authority Non-Amplification

ARPA already requires delegation attenuation, explicit scope proof, competent authority sources, fail-closed handling of missing authority, and discovery-is-not-authority semantics. This note names a cross-cutting failure pattern without changing those protocol semantics.

Authority laundering occurs when influence, repetition, reputation, discovery, projection, possession of unrelated authority, or another non-authoritative property is incorrectly treated as authority for the action being evaluated.

The governing rule is:

Communication, repetition, endorsement, aggregation, projection, discovery, reputation, or transformation MUST NOT increase the authority available from competent authoritative provenance and applicable scope.

The adversarial suite at conformance/test-vectors/adversarial/authority-laundering-v0.10.0.json pressure-tests this rule.

An evidence change is handled separately: authoritative evidence can change whether a policy predicate applies, but that event is not itself an authority grant.

Research provenance

This test tranche was informed by TSMM decision-resolution work and a read-only review of the independent Protocol of Care for Agents experiment:

  • https://github.com/JessHines360/protocol-of-care-for-agents
  • https://github.com/JessHines360/protocol-of-care-for-agents/blob/main/experiments/SIMULATION_01_RUNBOOK.md

ARPA does not adopt upstream normative vocabulary and has no dependency on that repository. No upstream writes were made.

Agent Registry Protocol documentation. Specification text and documentation are licensed as stated in the repository NOTICE and license files.

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