Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

Researchers introduce the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement layer that separates authorization, certification, and execution in autonomous agent systems. SEB ensures that production mutations can only occur through certificate-bound channels, preventing unauthorized actions by non-deterministic AI reasoning processes accessing cloud and deployment infrastructure.

The paper addresses a critical gap in current access-control architectures: autonomous agents increasingly control production infrastructure, yet existing identity-based authorization and action-certification systems lack a mandatory enforcement point at the moment of actual mutation. Traditional security models authorize identities or certify proposed actions independently, but neither prevents a compromised or misbehaving agent from executing unauthorized changes once granted initial access.

SEB introduces a three-layer separation model—proposal, admission, and execution—where certificates issued by a Sovereign Assurance Boundary must match requested mutations exactly before execution occurs. The broker validates temporal constraints (validity windows, policy epochs), checks revocation status, detects state drift, and mints short-lived scoped identities specific to each execution. This architecture transforms vague authorization into auditable, revocable runtime capabilities with complete decision and outcome logging.

For distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, this matters significantly. As AI agents move beyond isolated tasks into orchestrating deployments, data mutations, and resource provisioning, the risk surface expands dramatically. A single compromised agent or reasoning process could previously escalate privileges or execute unintended infrastructure changes. SEB's enforcement boundary prevents this by ensuring production APIs reject any mutations from non-broker identities, closing a structural vulnerability in agent-driven automation.

The prototype evaluation on AWS and Kubernetes demonstrates practical feasibility, measuring latency overheads and revocation propagation times. Organizations deploying autonomous agents in production environments should monitor adoption of SEB-like patterns to reduce blast radius from agent compromise or reasoning errors.

• →SEB separates agent proposal, security admission, and actual execution to prevent unauthorized infrastructure mutations by autonomous agents
• →Short-lived, revocable scoped identities replace long-lived agent credentials, reducing compromise impact window
• →Production APIs must reject non-broker identities to prevent bypass, making deployment architecture a critical security control
• →Certificate-bound execution enables complete audit trails and enables real-time revocation of agent permissions
• →Prototype testing on AWS and Kubernetes shows practical feasibility for production autonomous agent infrastructure