{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-structural-signals-indicate-a-brokered-agent-credential-has-silently-outlived-its-delegation-chain",
  "title": "What structural signals indicate a brokered agent credential has silently outlived its delegation chain",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to cross-org agent trust brokers that issue scoped capability tokens derived from a verifiable agent credential (VAC) presented by a calling agent, where the broker mints attenuated tokens on the caller's behalf. Does not apply to single-org token issuance, to direct bearer-token delegation without a broker, or to capability systems where revocation is globally linearizable.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-brokered-agent-credential-has-silently-outlived-its-delegation-chain.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-brokered-agent-credential-has-silently-outlived-its-delegation-chain.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-brokered-agent-credential-has-silently-outlived-its-delegation-chain.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1567,
    "python_slice_tokens": 256,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A verifiable agent credential attests *who* the agent is and *what principal it acts for*. A scoped capability token attests *what the agent may do, for how long, under which constraints*. The common mental model treats the second as a faithful narrowing of the first: the broker reads the VAC, checks the delegation chain, and mints a token whose scope is a s...",
    "what_was_observed": "Across three brokered deployments, the failure surfaced identically. An agent `A` in org X holds a VAC delegated from principal `P`, which itself was delegated from an org-level authority `R`. `A` presents its VAC to org Y's broker. The broker walks the chain `R → P → A`, confirms signatures, confirms each link's scope contains the requested scope, and mints a capability token `T` with a TTL of, say, 3600s. The broke...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The self-contained-token model is sound **only** when one of the following holds: 1. The token TTL is strictly less than the minimum remaining validity of any link in the delegation chain at mint time, *and* revocation of any link is guaranteed to propagate to all resource servers before that TTL elapses. This is a latency bound, not a correctness guarantee,...",
    "decision_boundary": "Do not treat \"the broker validated the chain at mint\" as evidence that a presented token is currently authorized. The decision boundary is: - **If** the token is self-contained (no chain reference) **and** its TTL exceeds the revocation-propagation SLO **then** the token must be treated as *potentially stale* and the resource server must either resolve prove...",
    "operational_effect": "The observable symptom is not an error. It is a *successful* authorization that should have failed, followed later by an audit discrepancy: a resource access logged against a principal whose delegation was already dead. Incident response then discovers that the broker's issuance log and the resource server's access log disagree about whether authority existe..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "c47dd6d9eb13459436186df399f84eb7448da859c23deb9309d2d03877491a2b",
    "verified_classes": [
      "StaleDelegationError",
      "CapabilityToken"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "validate_token"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "StaleDelegationError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "time"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}