Live Reference Resolution for Autonomous Agent Beliefs
draft-morrison-live-reference-resolution-00

Independent Submission                                       B. Morrison
Internet-Draft                                    Alter Meridian Pty Ltd
Intended status: Informational                               2 July 2026
Expires: 3 January 2027

         Live Reference Resolution for Autonomous Agent Beliefs
              draft-morrison-live-reference-resolution-00

Abstract

   A recurring class of autonomous-agent failure arises when an agent
   acts on a belief read from a cached, derived, or proxy copy that has
   silently diverged from the authority the belief claims to represent.
   This document describes a reference-resolution discipline for the
   working beliefs an agent reasons and acts from.  Each belief is held
   as a reference to a single named lowest authority and is resolved
   live at the point of use, with verification.  When the authority is
   unobservable or the resolved value is stale, the belief takes an
   explicit uncertainty state rather than a prior cached value; that
   state propagates to any belief derived from it, and an uncertain
   belief feeding a costly or irreversible act blocks or escalates
   rather than proceeding.  Every resolution chain terminates in a
   single self-authorising root.  The document is Informational.  It
   records a discipline and a vocabulary; it does not define a wire
   protocol.

Status of This Memo

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  The resolution discipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Belief as reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  Live resolution at the point of use . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.3.  Authority precedence  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     4.1.  The uncertainty state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.2.  Contagion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.3.  The consumer contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  Chain termination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   6.  The resolution result . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   7.  Relationship to other work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   8.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

1.  Introduction

   An autonomous agent holds many working beliefs: the current value of
   a configuration item, which record is authoritative, whether a code
   path is still live, what the present state of a shared resource is.
   A wide class of agent errors has one shape.  The agent reads such a
   belief from a copy that once matched an authority but has since
   diverged, and acts on the copy as though it were the authority.
   Common instances include a stale index read in place of the canonical
   registry, an ambient assumption carried across calls, a retained but
   superseded code path treated as current, and a narrative document
   trusted for a value that a live system actually owns.

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   Existing mechanisms address adjacent concerns.  Capability systems
   govern the authority to act.  Content-addressing and transparency
   logs govern the naming and integrity of data and artefacts.  Message-
   signature schemes such as [RFC9421] bind a request to a key.  None of
   these govern the working beliefs an agent reasons from, and none
   defines what an agent should do when the authority for a belief
   cannot be observed at the moment the belief is needed.

   This document describes a discipline for that layer.  It is
   deliberately narrow.  It concerns the resolution of a belief against
   its authority, the handling of staleness, and the termination of
   resolution chains.  It does not describe how any particular authority
   is implemented, how capabilities or credentials are provisioned, or
   how conflicting assertions from multiple agents are arbitrated.

2.  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.

   Belief:  A value on which an agent will act.

   Authority:  The single named source that owns the current value of a
      belief.  An authority is the lowest source in a precedence order
      that can answer for the belief: for a live value, a running system
      rather than a document describing it.

   Reference:  A stable identifier for a belief together with the name
      of its authority, held in place of a stored value.

   Resolution:  The act of dereferencing a reference against its named
      authority to obtain a current value, at the point of use.

   Point of use:  The moment, contemporaneous with the act that consumes
      a belief, at which resolution occurs.  Resolution performed
      earlier and cached is not resolution at the point of use.

   Uncertainty state:  An explicit value a belief takes when its
      authority is unobservable, its resolved value fails verification,
      or a freshness bound is exceeded.

   Constitutive root:  A self-authorising source that answers for
      itself, such as a cryptographic key or a ratified decision record,
      in which a resolution chain terminates.

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3.  The resolution discipline

3.1.  Belief as reference

   An agent SHOULD hold a belief on which it will act as a reference
   rather than a stored value.  The reference names the belief and its
   single lowest authority.  Holding the belief as a reference is what
   makes live resolution possible; a value copied into the agent's state
   carries no way to detect that the authority has since changed.

3.2.  Live resolution at the point of use

   An agent SHOULD resolve a reference at the point of use,
   contemporaneously with the act that consumes the belief, by
   dereferencing the named authority to obtain a current value and
   verifying that value against the authority.  A cached, derived, or
   proxy copy of the belief SHOULD NOT stand in for a live dereference
   of the named authority at the point of an act.

   Where an authority is expensive to dereference on every use, an agent
   MAY apply a bounded exemption only when all of the following hold:
   the belief follows from an observed fact under current semantics, the
   cost of being wrong is small and readily reversible, and either a
   fail-closed check catches the wrong case or the belief decays at a
   boundary served by a live change-detection channel.  A belief feeding
   a costly, irreversible, or externally visible act MUST NOT be
   exempted and MUST be re-resolved against its authority at the point
   of use.

3.3.  Authority precedence

   Where more than one source could answer for a belief, the authority
   is the lowest source in a precedence order that places an executing
   system above an artefact generated or enforced by continuous
   integration, above a hand-maintained document.  A value claimed by a
   lower-precedence source MUST NOT override a live dereference of a
   higher-precedence authority.  A document labelling itself
   authoritative is not, by that label, the authority.

4.  Uncertainty

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4.1.  The uncertainty state

   When the named authority is unobservable, the resolved value fails
   verification, or a declared freshness bound is exceeded, the belief
   MUST take the explicit uncertainty state rather than a prior cached
   value.  Freshness MAY be expressed per authority as a maximum
   staleness interval or a monotonically-advancing epoch, and crossing
   the bound triggers the uncertainty state without requiring an
   affirmative invalidation message from the authority.

   The uncertainty state is a first-class value that a belief carries,
   not the absence of a value and not a low numeric confidence attached
   to an asserted value.

4.2.  Contagion

   The uncertainty state is contagious.  An agent MUST propagate it to
   every belief derived, in whole or in part, from an uncertain belief,
   so that the state is carried across the agent's belief graph rather
   than terminating at the belief that first became uncertain.  Two
   warranted beliefs that resolve to contradictory values cancel to the
   uncertainty state rather than being reconciled by a precedence pick,
   forcing re-resolution or escalation.

4.3.  The consumer contract

   Uncertainty is default-closed at the point of consumption.  When an
   uncertain belief is an input to an act classified as costly or
   irreversible, the agent MUST block the act or escalate for resolution
   rather than proceed on the uncertain belief.  The classification of
   an act as costly or irreversible is itself a belief resolved under
   this discipline.  The obligation applies to the conjunction of
   several uncertain inputs, so that two or more individually marginal
   uncertainties compound into the obligation to block.

   This consumer contract is the point of the discipline.  Marking a
   belief uncertain achieves nothing unless a downstream consumer is
   obliged to act on the mark.  Making the obligation explicit and
   mechanical answers the objection that degrading a belief to
   uncertainty merely moves the problem downstream.

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5.  Chain termination

   Every resolution chain MUST terminate in exactly one constitutive
   root, a self-authorising source drawn from a closed set such as a
   cryptographic key or a ratified decision record.  A constitutive root
   answers for itself and fails closed; it is conferred from outside the
   belief graph rather than being another belief inside it.  Before an
   act, an agent SHOULD reject a reference whose resolution chain is
   circular or fails to terminate in such a root, and SHOULD record
   which reference was rejected.  This gives resolution a static
   termination guarantee and rejects un-rooted or circular belief
   references before they can drive an act.

   A ratified decision that supersedes an implementation outranks a
   retained but unmarked instance of that implementation.  A belief in
   the liveness of the superseded implementation takes the uncertainty
   state until the implementation is removed or carries a machine-
   readable supersession marker.

6.  The resolution result

   An agent that exposes belief resolution to other components SHOULD
   return, with the value and atomically bound to it, at least: the
   identifier of the authority that answered, a freshness indicator, and
   a provenance type.  Binding these to the value means no consumer can
   obtain the value without also obtaining its authority, its recency,
   and how it was known.

   A provenance type is drawn from a closed set.  This document does not
   define the set normatively, but distinguishing at least a direct read
   of an authority, a presumption, and an unverified inference is
   RECOMMENDED.  A value carrying a presumption or an unverified-
   inference provenance type MUST NOT be relabelled as a direct read by
   any downstream consumer.

7.  Relationship to other work

   This discipline is complementary to, and distinct from, several
   adjacent mechanisms.  It concerns beliefs, not the authority to act;
   it therefore complements capability and delegation systems rather
   than replacing them.  It concerns live resolution and staleness
   handling, not the integrity of static artefacts; it therefore
   composes with content-addressing and transparency logs.  The
   provenance type introduced here generalises the per-observation
   provenance tags described in [SUBSTRATEOBS].  Arbitration among
   several already-emitted and conflicting assertions, and the
   provisioning of capabilities or credentials, are out of scope for
   this document.

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8.  Security Considerations

   The discipline relocates trust rather than removing it.  An agent
   following this discipline trusts its authorities and the freshness
   bounds it declares for them.  The gains are that the trust is placed
   in a single named source per belief, that the source is re-checked at
   the point of use, and that failure to observe the source degrades to
   an explicit blocking state rather than to silent use of a stale
   value.  An implementation that declares over-generous freshness
   bounds, or that permits a lower-precedence source to answer for a
   belief, weakens these gains.

   Constitutive roots are the base of trust.  Compromise of a
   cryptographic key or subversion of the process that ratifies a
   decision record compromises every belief whose chain terminates in
   that root.  Roots therefore warrant the protections appropriate to
   keying material and to governance records.

   The uncertainty state is a denial surface.  An adversary who can make
   an authority unobservable can drive dependent beliefs to uncertainty
   and thereby block costly acts.  This is a fail-closed outcome and is
   preferable to silent action on stale values, but implementers should
   ensure that the escalation path for a blocked act cannot itself be
   starved.

9.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

10.  References

10.1.  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>.

10.2.  Informative References

   [RFC9421]  Backman, A., Ed., Richer, J., Ed., and M. Sporny, "HTTP
              Message Signatures", RFC 9421, DOI 10.17487/RFC9421,
              February 2024, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9421>.

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   [SUBSTRATEOBS]
              Morrison, B., "Substrate-Observation Coordination of
              Concurrent Agent Sessions", 2026,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-morrison-
              substrate-observation/>.

Acknowledgements

   This discipline was distilled from operational failure patterns
   observed in autonomous coding agents.

Author's Address

   Blake Morrison
   Alter Meridian Pty Ltd
   Email: blake@truealter.com

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