<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<reference anchor="I-D.howard-virp" target="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-howard-virp-05">
   <front>
      <title>VIRP: Verified Infrastructure Response Protocol</title>
      <author initials="N." surname="Howard" fullname="Nathan Howard">
         <organization>Third Level IT LLC</organization>
      </author>
      <date month="May" day="21" year="2026" />
      <abstract>
	 <t>   The Verified Infrastructure Response Protocol (VIRP) defines a
   cryptographic trust framework for operators -- human or autonomous --
   acting on live network infrastructure.  As operations increasingly
   shift toward agentic and automated systems capable of autonomously
   configuring, auditing, and remediating production environments, the
   absence of a verifiable chain of custody for observations and actions
   introduces fundamental risks: fabricated telemetry, unauthorized
   state changes, and the inability to distinguish legitimate operations
   from compromise.

   VIRP addresses this through seven trust primitives that collectively
   enforce observation integrity, two-channel separation, intent gating,
   outcome verification, baseline memory, multi-vendor normalization,
   and trust federation.  Observations are cryptographically signed at
   collection time using a dual-signature scheme: HMAC-SHA256 for chain
   integrity and Ed25519 for asymmetric proof of origin.  A two-channel
   architecture separates read-only Observation from write-intent
   Intent, with intent gating enforced at the protocol layer.  Trust
   tiers (GREEN/YELLOW/RED/BLACK) govern action authorization with
   human-in-the-loop controls for elevated operations.

   This document presents the protocol specification, a live multi-
   vendor implementation (IronClaw) exercised against 35 Cisco IOS
   routers, a FortiGate 200G firewall, and Cisco 3850 switching
   infrastructure, adversarial findings produced by the agent under
   test, and a containment architecture derived from those findings.
   Phase 1 formal protocol analysis -- HMAC key secrecy and non-
   injective agreement under the Dolev-Yao adversary model -- has been
   machine-verified in both ProVerif and Tamarin and is referenced in
   Section 17.1.  Results demonstrate that VIRP enables verifiable
   infrastructure audit trails and that properly contained operator
   processes -- whether human-driven or autonomous -- can be bounded by
   structural cryptographic separation rather than policy alone.

	 </t>
      </abstract>
   </front>
   <seriesInfo name="Internet-Draft" value="draft-howard-virp-05" />
   
</reference>
