Episode 210 - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki

Title: Attenuating Agentic Delegation Tokens

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Description

AI agents increasingly delegate work across chains of agents and tools—but today’s OAuth tokens often carry more authority than each step actually needs. This episode explores Attenuating Authorization Tokens, a proposed OAuth credential that lets agents derive progressively narrower, task-scoped permissions while preserving a cryptographically verifiable delegation chain. We’ll examine how offline attenuation, tool-level constraints, and proof of possession could reduce prompt-injection and confused-deputy risks without requiring the authorization server at every delegation hop.

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Takeaways

  • ⚡ Attenuation is not automatically least privilege. Two individually narrowed tokens can potentially be recombined to recreate dangerous authority. AAT therefore depends on each invocation being tied to one task-specific, traceable delegation chain.

  • ⚡ AAT prioritizes provability over policy expressiveness. Instead of embedding a general-purpose policy language, the proposal uses a small set of structurally comparable constraints so a verifier can prove that every delegation becomes narrower.

  • ⚡ Offline verification is the feature—and the tradeoff. Agents can derive and verify delegated authority without returning to the authorization server, but revocation becomes harder. The current answer is primarily short-lived tokens, which may still be inadequate for one-time actions such as wire transfers.

  • ⚡ The architecture fits distributed agents better than agents sharing one process. Each sub-agent should control its own key pair, but proof of possession means little when every agent can read the same process memory. Ephemeral agent identity and accountability remain unresolved implementation questions.

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