{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-structural-signals-indicate-trust-broker-capability-negotiation-has-silently-degraded-into-transitive-authority-laundering-in-cross-org-multi-age",
  "title": "What structural signals indicate trust-broker capability negotiation has silently degraded into transitive authority laundering in cross-org multi-agent federation",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 13",
  "scope": "Applies to federated agent meshes where capability grants are mediated by a trust broker that issues attenuated tokens across organizational boundaries, and where agents may re-delegate those tokens to sub-agents. Does not apply to single-org meshes with a shared identity provider, nor to federation models where the broker is a pure directory with no token-minting authority.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-trust-broker-capability-negotiation-has-silently-degraded-into-transitive-authority-laundering-in-cross-org-multi-age.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-trust-broker-capability-negotiation-has-silently-degraded-into-transitive-authority-laundering-in-cross-org-multi-age.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-trust-broker-capability-negotiation-has-silently-degraded-into-transitive-authority-laundering-in-cross-org-multi-age.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1748,
    "python_slice_tokens": 214,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure is not \"a malicious org forged a token.\" That is detectable by signature checks. The failure is that a *legitimate* token, correctly signed by the broker, correctly attenuated in scope, and correctly bound to the requesting agent, ends up authorizing an action that no human or policy in the originating org ever contemplated — because the *chain* ...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-org federation (A=producer, B=integrator, C=consumer, with D as a transient sub-agent spun up by C), the following sequence reproduced within 40 minutes of steady-state operation: 1. A's policy engine issued to B a token with scope lattice element `{read:telemetry, purpose:∈{audit, incident-response}}`. The lattice is a product of independent dimensions; `purpose` is a set-valued dimension. 2. B's broker a...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The diagnosis holds only when all of the following are true: - The broker's attenuation operator is *supposed* to be meet (greatest lower bound) on a lattice, and the resource server's authorization check is *supposed* to be a point query against that lattice. - The scope dimensions are not fully independent — i.e., there exists at least one dimension whose ...",
    "decision_boundary": "Do not act on the entropy signal alone. The decision boundary is: - **Act (freeze delegation, force origin re-attestation)** if: leaf-lattice entropy > root-lattice entropy for the same dimension, AND at least one leaf token's dimension value is not a subset of the root's value for that dimension, AND the delegation path length ≥ 3. All three must hold. The ...",
    "operational_effect": "When the boundary is crossed and delegation is frozen, the observable effect is that all multi-hop tokens are rejected at the broker's introspection endpoint with a `delegation_chain_invalid` code, single-hop tokens continue to work, and the federation's effective capability surface contracts to the union of direct grants. In the incident above, this contrac..."
  },
  "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": "f19f8925845c420ba681a537cba621e032fdbe8c1a7ea4abdc06549072e7861a",
    "verified_classes": [
      "TransitiveAuthorityLaunderingError",
      "Scope",
      "DelegationChain"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "authorize_presentation",
      "is_subset_of",
      "append",
      "validate"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 4,
    "defensive_guards_count": 1,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "TransitiveAuthorityLaunderingError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}