KYA: A Framework-Agnostic Trust Layer for Autonomous Systems with Verifiable Provenance and Hierarchical Policy Composition

Abstract

KYA (Know Your Agents) is an open-source, framework-agnostic trust and governance layer for autonomous systems, composed of five primitives: (1) a four-gate inbound apply pipeline; (2) an only-tighten composition algebra over a three-channel multi-tenant hierarchy; (3) KYP (Know Your Principal), a schema-level unification of trust scoring across human users, AI agents, and service accounts; (4) auditable interaction-multiplier amplification over an AIVSS-shaped additive baseline; and (5) two-axis delegation attribution: a static premium for risky delegates and a runtime debit for actual delegate misbehavior in multi-agent fan-out. Together these span three pillars (trust, governance, and evidentiary assurance), making an autonomous system's actions authorized, policy-conforming, and post-hoc verifiable: where observability answers how long, how much, and what path, KYA answers was it authorized, did it conform, and can it be verified; it composes with observability rather than replacing it. It ships native adapters for 15+ agent frameworks. On a 4 by 9 cross-backend matrix all 36 cells pass; the pure-function scorer runs sub-millisecond at p99 and the system sustains ~ 1,800 ops/sec at 20 concurrent workers with HMAC chain integrity preserved end-to-end. KYA detects 89% of 1,200 adversarial probes from PyRIT and Garak, including the recently-published topology-guided multi-agent attack. The system is available under Apache 2.0 as the veldt-kya package on PyPI.