{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "which-invariants-prevent-trust-score-laundering-across-policy-bounded-federated-agent-meshes",
  "title": "Which invariants prevent trust-score laundering across policy-bounded federated agent meshes",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 9",
  "scope": "Applies to cross-organizational multi-agent federation where message routing is gated by per-hop policy engines and peer trust is a scalar or vector score aggregated from local observations. Does not apply to single-tenant meshes, to federations with a single shared trust authority, or to systems where routing decisions are stateless and trust-invariant.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-trust-score-laundering-across-policy-bounded-federated-agent-meshes.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-trust-score-laundering-across-policy-bounded-federated-agent-meshes.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-trust-score-laundering-across-policy-bounded-federated-agent-meshes.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A federated agent mesh has two independent control planes that are frequently conflated: the **routing plane** (which enforces policy-bounded reachability—can org A's agent reach org C's agent, possibly via org B's relay?) and the **trust plane** (which aggregates observations into a reputation score used for admission, throttling, and delegation). The non-o...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-org federation (A, B, C) with A↔B and B↔C edges but no A↔C edge, org B's relay agent forwarded A-originated task completions to C. C's trust engine recorded successful completions and raised its score for the *originating principal* (A's agent identity, carried in the envelope). Because the routing policy at B permitted the relay (it was a legitimate federation broker), no policy violation fired. But C's t...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The invariant holds (i.e., laundering is prevented) only when all three of the following are simultaneously true: 1. **Provenance is signed end-to-end and the trust engine verifies signatures at the *consumer*, not the relay.** If the relay re-signs, the relay becomes the asserted principal and the chain is broken at that link. 2. **The trust engine weights ...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational decision is whether to **admit a relayed message into the trust-aggregation path at all**, or to admit it only into the routing path with trust-neutral treatment. The boundary: - If the relay is a *declared federation broker* with its own trust score and the consumer can recompute hop-weighted attribution → admit with weighted attribution (co...",
    "operational_effect": "When the invariant is enforced, relayed messages still route (availability preserved) but their trust contribution is either hop-weighted or zeroed. The measurable effect is that an adversary cannot bootstrap admission through a high-trust relay; the cost of laundering becomes `1 / (t(relay, victim) * t(adversary, relay))` in expected interactions, which gro..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
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      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
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    "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"
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    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
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      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
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  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "ca588b179cf3d3fc59415cfc0772c3b8c66101fbc251aa62bd6c3648cc4b241d",
    "verified_classes": [
      "TrustLaunderingError"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "attribute_trust"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "TrustLaunderingError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}