AITH: A Post-Quantum Continuous Delegation Protocol for Human-AI Trust Establishment
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914461086908416 |
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| author | Chen, Zhaoliang |
| author_facet | Chen, Zhaoliang |
| contents | The rapid deployment of AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of human principals has outpaced the development of cryptographic protocols for establishing, bounding, and revoking human-AI trust relationships. Existing frameworks (TLS, OAuth 2.0, Macaroons) assume deterministic software and cannot address probabilistic AI agents operating continuously within variable trust boundaries.
We present AITH (AI Trust Handshake), a post-quantum continuous delegation protocol. AITH introduces: (1) a Continuous Delegation Certificate signed once with ML-DSA-87 (FIPS 204, NIST Level 5), replacing per-operation signing with sub-microsecond boundary checks at 4.7M ops/sec; (2) a six-check Boundary Engine enforcing hard constraints, rate limits, and escalation triggers with zero cryptographic overhead on the critical path; (3) a push-based Revocation Protocol propagating invalidation within one second. A three-tier SHA-256 Responsibility Chain provides tamper-evident audit logging. All five security theorems are machine-verified via Tamarin Prover under the Dolev-Yao model.
We validate AITH through five rounds of multi-model adversarial auditing, resolving 12 vulnerabilities across four severity layers. Simulation of 100,000 operations shows 79.5% autonomous execution, 6.1% human escalation, and 14.4% blocked. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07695 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | AITH: A Post-Quantum Continuous Delegation Protocol for Human-AI Trust Establishment Chen, Zhaoliang Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence K.6.5; D.4.6; C.2.0 The rapid deployment of AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of human principals has outpaced the development of cryptographic protocols for establishing, bounding, and revoking human-AI trust relationships. Existing frameworks (TLS, OAuth 2.0, Macaroons) assume deterministic software and cannot address probabilistic AI agents operating continuously within variable trust boundaries. We present AITH (AI Trust Handshake), a post-quantum continuous delegation protocol. AITH introduces: (1) a Continuous Delegation Certificate signed once with ML-DSA-87 (FIPS 204, NIST Level 5), replacing per-operation signing with sub-microsecond boundary checks at 4.7M ops/sec; (2) a six-check Boundary Engine enforcing hard constraints, rate limits, and escalation triggers with zero cryptographic overhead on the critical path; (3) a push-based Revocation Protocol propagating invalidation within one second. A three-tier SHA-256 Responsibility Chain provides tamper-evident audit logging. All five security theorems are machine-verified via Tamarin Prover under the Dolev-Yao model. We validate AITH through five rounds of multi-model adversarial auditing, resolving 12 vulnerabilities across four severity layers. Simulation of 100,000 operations shows 79.5% autonomous execution, 6.1% human escalation, and 14.4% blocked. |
| title | AITH: A Post-Quantum Continuous Delegation Protocol for Human-AI Trust Establishment |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence K.6.5; D.4.6; C.2.0 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07695 |