GVAI-1 — Global Verified Action Infrastructure: Identity, Authorization, Provenance and Accountability for AI Agents and Digital Systems

Abstract

GVAI-1 — Global Verified Action Infrastructure Identity, Authorization, Provenance and Accountability for AI Agents and Digital Systems Author and Rights Holder: Bidyut MazumdarORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5615-3558Version: 1.0.0Publication Year: 2026Resource Type: Computer SoftwareVersion-Specific DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18417612Access Status: Public metadata with restricted file accessRights Statement: Proprietary intellectual property; rights reserved to the extent legally owned or controlled by the rights holder, subject to applicable law, prior licence grants, and third-party rights. 1. EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW GVAI-1 (Global Verified Action Infrastructure) is a proposed research framework and reference architecture for identity-aware, policy-governed, evidence-supported digital actions across environments involving human users, autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, software services, and institutional systems. As digital systems increasingly initiate transactions, invoke application programming interfaces (APIs), access sensitive information, modify resources, and execute delegated operations, a fundamental governance challenge emerges: How can a digital action be associated with a verifiable identity, appropriately scoped authority, applicable authorization rules, traceable evidence, and accountable review? GVAI-1 explores this challenge through a proposed architecture connecting identity representation, delegated authority, contextual authorization, evidence provenance, auditability, interoperability, and governance workflows. Its objective is to provide a structured foundation for examining how consequential digital actions may be authorized, documented, reviewed, and evaluated across heterogeneous computational environments. The framework is intended to support technical research, architecture assessment, prototype development, interoperability analysis, security evaluation, and potential enterprise or institutional implementation. Research-status statement: GVAI-1 is presented as a proposed framework and research-stage technical asset. This publication describes architectural objectives, design considerations, and potential applications. It does not, by itself, establish that every component has been implemented, independently validated, deployed, certified, or demonstrated to satisfy production requirements. 2. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND RESEARCH MOTIVATION Conventional identity and access-control mechanisms address essential aspects of digital security. However, increasingly autonomous and delegated operations raise additional questions concerning the scope of authority, contextual permissions, revocation, execution evidence, and accountability. Relevant questions include: Who or what initiated the action? Who granted the authority under which the action was requested? Which permissions, policies, and contextual constraints applied? Was the authority valid, appropriately scoped, and revocable? What evidence records the authorization decision and execution outcome? Can an authorized reviewer reconstruct the relevant sequence of events? Which person, organization, service, or process is accountable? GVAI-1 investigates how these questions might be addressed through a structured relationship between identity, authority, policy evaluation, evidence, and governance. The framework distinguishes identity from authorization, authorization from successful and safe execution, and recorded evidence from independently established truth. These distinctions are central to evaluating the reliability and accountability of AI-enabled and other automated digital operations. 3. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURAL MODEL 3.1 Verified Identity and Delegated Authority A proposed identity and credential layer for representing human users, AI agents, software services, and institutional actors, together with relevant authority, delegation scope, validity periods, and revocation conditions. Integration with identity providers, credential systems, and trust infrastructures requires implementation-specific design, compatible interfaces, and appropriate evaluation. 3.2 Policy-Based Authorization A proposed policy-evaluation component for assessing requested actions against permissions, contextual constraints, authorization rules, validity periods, and applicable governance requirements. Effective enforcement depends on secure implementation, correct configuration, compatible integration, and testing of the protected execution target. 3.3 Evidence Provenance and Auditability A proposed evidence architecture for associating relevant actions with actor identifiers, authorization decisions, policy references, timestamps, contextual information, and execution outcomes. The integrity, completeness, reliability, retention, and tamper resistance of resulting records depend on implementation, cryptographic controls, key management, storage architecture, and operational conditions. 3.4 Interoperability and Integration A proposed interface layer for connecting identity services, authorization engines, AI-agent frameworks, software applications, APIs, and institutional workflows. Interoperability is a design objective. Compatibility with any specific product, protocol, standard, or institution must be established through documented integration and testing. 3.5 Accountability and Governance Workflows A proposed governance layer for defining responsibilities, authorization boundaries, evidence requirements, exception handling, review procedures, and escalation paths for consequential digital actions. 3.6 Deployment and Commercial Evaluation Potential evaluation pathways include controlled research pilots, enterprise integrations, institutional workflows, and public-sector applications. Such activities require appropriate technical validation, security assessment, privacy review, legal evaluation, and valid contractual arrangements where applicable. 4. INTENDED RESEARCH AND APPLICATION AREAS Potential application areas include: AI-agent identity and delegated-action governance Context-aware authorization for software services and API operations Digital identity and access-control integration Evidence-based auditing and incident investigation Governance of machine-initiated transactions and digital operations Provenance-aware institutional workflows Accountability controls for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems Enterprise and public-sector digital infrastructure Interoperable authorization and trust architectures These are proposed application areas, not claims of completed deployment, regulatory approval, certification, or demonstrated effectiveness. 5. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND EVALUATION PRIORITIES Meaningful evaluation of GVAI-1 would require explicit research questions, testable requirements, reproducible procedures, documented baselines, measurable acceptance criteria, and independently reviewable evidence. Relevant evaluation dimensions include: Authorization correctness and policy consistency. Least-privilege enforcement and privilege-escalation resistance. Delegation expiry and revocation behaviour. Replay, impersonation, credential-compromise, and API-abuse resistance. Integrity and completeness of evidence records. Failure handling and recovery behaviour. Latency, throughput, and computational overhead. Privacy exposure and data-minimization effectiveness. Interoperability and integration complexity. Audit reconstruction and accountability outcomes. Comparisons with established approaches should use documented baselines and reproducible test conditions. No quantitative performance improvement, security superiority, universal compatibility, or comparative advantage is asserted without appropriate supporting evidence. 6. SECURITY, PRIVACY, AND THREAT MODEL A credible implementation should examine threats including compromised credentials, malicious or misconfigured agents, excessive delegated privileges, authorization-engine failures, replay attacks, key compromise, audit-record manipulation, insider threats, denial of service, privacy leakage, and failures in external identity or authorization providers. Potential safeguards include: Least-privilege authorization. Time-bounded credentials and delegations. Explicit revocation mechanisms. Secure key management and cryptographic integrity controls. Monitored execution and appropriate policy-decision logging. Data minimization and privacy-aware retention. Fail-safe behaviour and exception handling. Incident-response and recovery procedures. These are design and evaluation considerations. Their effectiveness must be established through implementation-specific testing and, where appropriate, independent security assessment. No safeguard should be treated as effective merely because it is listed in the proposed architecture. 7. PACKAGE SCOPE AND ARTIFACT IDENTIFICATION Primary archive: GVAI-1_Global_Verified_Action_Infrastructure_Master_Package.zip The archive is identified as the principal package associated with this Zenodo record. Its precise contents, completeness, internal structure, and integrity must be established by inspecting the actual archive and its constituent files. No particular source file, implementation module, test suite, dependency manifest, cryptographic manifest, or validation report should be considered present or verified solely from the archive filename or this description. Where applicable, future releases should document file inventories, software dependencies, version identifiers, checksums, source-to-artifact relationships, and reproducible validation procedures. 8. REPRODUCIBILITY AND EVIDENCE INTEGRITY Reproducibility is a core research objective. Appropriate release practices include: Explicit version identification. Documented execution environments and dependencies. Cryptographic file checksums. Source-to-artifact traceability. Reproduci