TRACE: Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence (A Portable Attestation Format for AI Agent Runtime Governance)

Abstract

TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence) proposes a portable record for claims about AI agent runtimes: workload identity, model, policy, data class, tool transcript, build provenance, and appraisal. It composes RATS/EAT, signatures, and transparency evidence into a format that a relying party can evaluate against its own trust policy. A valid signature establishes integrity and possession of the signing key; hardware origin additionally requires verified attestation and a binding from that evidence to the key. This technical report describes the original design and preserves the recorded software evaluation of agentrust-trace 0.2.0 and trace-tests 0.2.0. The evaluation measures canonicalization, Ed25519 signing and verification, record size, and fixture outcomes. It does not measure silicon certificate-chain appraisal or establish that the recorded runtime claims are true. The current normative specification and its implementation limits are maintained separately. Technical report, version 1. Not peer reviewed. Recorded experiments were not rerun for this edition.