AUDIT — Agent Use of Delegation and Interaction Traceability (approved IETF BoF request, bofreq-kuhlewind-audit-agent-use-of-delegation-and-interaction-traceability-00)

Abstract

Verbatim from the IETF BoF request page (Description, retrieved 2026-10-12): "Autonomous and semi-autonomous software agents are increasingly acting on behalf of users across multiple services and administrative domains. These agents interact across multiple administrative or trust domains and can initiate actions without direct human oversight at each step. The increased use of complex agent communications introduces significant challenges for auditability, accountability, transparency. Existing mechanisms, such as system logs, tracing systems, and authorization frameworks, capture individual aspects of system behavior but lack interoperable support for correlating user intent, delegation chains, authorization state, and resulting actions across domains. This creates challenges for fundamental questions required for compliance, operational debugging, and user trust, such as who initiated an action, under which authority it occurred, and how permissions evolved during execution." — "To support governance, compliance, transparency, and trust in such environments, auditing is required that collects and correlates evidence across participating domains rather than relying solely on local agent logs, where no single party has complete visibility into a multi-domain interaction. The scope of such auditing is the observable behavior of agents, including user intent, agent or tool interactions, invoked or declined actions, exchanged data, and resulting outcomes across trust boundaries, but not the auditing of the underlying AI model, training data, or inference mechanisms." — "The AUDIT effort aims to define interoperable protocol mechanisms and data models for auditing and accountability of agents and delegated systems to record, exchange, and verify audit-relevant information across Internet protocols cross all interactions in a communication chain including the user, one or multiple agents or subagents, and tools. This includes an architectural concept, common models for audit records, propagation of audit context across interactions, and integration with existing IETF protocols such as OAuth, HTTP, and attestation and transparency frameworks." The request lists technology overlap with OAUTH, WIMSE, SCITT, RATS, HTTPbis, Webbotauth, DAWN and AgentProto, and cites relevant drafts draft-kuehlewind-audit-architecture-00 and draft-birkholz-verifiable-agent-conversations-00; the mailing list is audit@ietf.org.