Mandato: Protocol-Level Enforcement of Digitally Signed Mandates on AI Agent Actions with Cryptographically Chained Audit Trails

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly act on external systems through standardized tool-calling protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet no infrastructure layer constrains their actions to what a principal has verifiably authorized: authorization logic lives in application code, is neither signed nor independently auditable, and the resulting logs lack evidentiary value. We present Mandato, a governance proxy that enforces digitally signed mandates