Web4 Delegated Authority

Abstract

This document defines signed, bounded, time-limited, and revocable authority mandates for agents and nodes and links governed actions to their authority.¶

1. Conventions and Terminology

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶

2. Introduction

This document defines a public mandate object for bounded and revocable authority delegated to an agent or node without exposing private reasoning or model state.¶

3. Mandate Model

A mandate MUST identify the mandate, grantor, grantee, permitted actions, prohibited actions where applicable, resource scope, policy, validity period, delegation rules, status mechanism, and proof.¶

{
  "mandate_id": "urn:web4:mandate:01JEXAMPLE",
  "grantor_id": "did:example:principal-1",
  "grantee_id": "did:example:agent-7",
  "permitted_actions": ["submit_assessment"],
  "prohibited_actions": ["change_policy"],
  "policy_id": "urn:web4:policy:delegation:v1",
  "maximum_delegation_depth": 0,
  "status_uri": "https://status.example/mandates/01JEXAMPLE",
  "proof": {
    "type": "ExampleProof",
    "verification_method": "did:example:principal-1#key-1",
    "value": "BASE64URL-SIGNATURE"
  }
}

4. Grant and Acceptance

The grantor MUST have authority to issue the mandate. Acceptance MUST NOT expand granted authority.¶

5. Delegation

A delegated mandate MUST identify its parent and MUST never expand action scope, resource scope, validity, or delegation depth.¶

6. Action Linkage

Each governed action MUST identify the mandate relied upon, actor, action type, target, performance time, and resulting receipt.¶

7. Human Control

A policy MAY require human approval for named actions. The requirement and outcome MUST be externally identifiable without exposing private deliberation.¶

8. Suspension and Revocation

A mandate MUST provide a resolvable status and authorized revocation path. Revocation MUST prevent new authorization while preserving historical receipts.¶

9. Conformance

Conformance MUST NOT require disclosure of chain-of-thought, planning logic, policy optimization, model weights, or private model state.¶

10. Relationship to Research Artifacts

Broader Web4 architectural work is described informatively in [I-D.reilly-web4]. Informative research materials MAY be published as versioned scholarly artifacts, including DOI-addressable records.¶

A research artifact is not required for conformance unless expressly incorporated as a Normative Reference by a named profile. Referencing or verifying an artifact does not establish the truth of its conclusions, regulatory approval, certification, security, legal compliance, or IETF endorsement.¶

A Conforming Implementation MUST NOT require access to KCoordinate, KQAS, or another protected internal assessment method unless a separate deployment agreement selects that implementation.¶

11. Security Considerations

Implementations MUST authenticate issuers, validate proof integrity, check proof purpose, enforce temporal validity, and resolve current status before relying on an object.¶

Implementations MUST address identifier confusion, issuer impersonation, key compromise, algorithm downgrade, replay, stale status, unauthorized supersession, cross-policy confusion, canonicalization ambiguity, denial of service, and fail-open handling of indeterminate validity.¶

Evidence commitments can confirm correspondence with committed bytes but do not prove truth, completeness, legality, provenance, or fitness for purpose. Profiles SHOULD define privacy-preserving commitment procedures for low-entropy artifacts.¶

Implementations MUST prevent privilege escalation, delegation-depth bypass, mandate replay, confused-deputy behavior, and post-revocation authorization.¶

12. Privacy Considerations

Persistent identifiers, status queries, proofs, policy references, and linked receipts can enable correlation. Implementations MUST minimize disclosed data and SHOULD use unlinkable or pairwise identifiers where they satisfy policy.¶

Private evidence MAY remain undisclosed and be represented by a cryptographic commitment. Retention and erasure requirements MUST be specified by policy and account for applicable obligations.¶

13. IANA Considerations

This document requests no IANA actions.¶

14. Normative References

[RFC2119]

Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

[RFC8174]

Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

15. Informative References

[I-D.reilly-web4]

Reilly, L. J., "Web4: A Verifiable, Agent-Native Architecture for the World Wide Web", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-reilly-web4-00, 26 August 2026, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-reilly-web4/>.