Aegon: Auditable AI Content Access with Ledger-Bound Tokens and Hardware-Attested Mobile Receipts

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 Apr 2026] Aegon: Auditable AI Content Access with Ledger-Bound Tokens and Hardware-Attested Mobile Receipts Amrish Baskaran, Nirbhay Pherwani, Raghul Krishnan Recent standards such as RSL address AI content policy declaration -- telling AI systems what the licensing terms are. However, no existing system provides audit infrastructure -- tamper-evident licensing transaction records with independently verifiable proofs that those records have not been retroactively modified. We describe Aegon, a protocol that extends standard JWT tokens with content-specific licensing claims and maintains a Certificate Transparency-style Merkle tree over an append-only transaction ledger, enabling third-party auditors to independently verify that specific content licensing transactions were recorded and have not been retroactively modified. Publishers validate tokens at the edge using standard JWKS with no broker dependency in the content delivery path. A signed provenance event log tracks content through AI transformation stages (chunking, embedding, retrieval, citation), bound to ledger entries by transaction ID. We further describe hardware-attested compliance receipts for on-device Android AI agents using StrongBox secure element attestation -- to our knowledge, the first application of hardware-attested compliance receipts to AI content licensing. Existing DRM systems use hardware-backed keys for content decryption but do not produce verifiable compliance receipts for audit trails. We describe a reference architecture and an evaluation methodology for measuring protocol overhead. The protocol runs entirely over standard HTTPS and is designed to complement existing licensing standards rather than replace them. Comments: 9 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Protocol design white paper. Submitted to arXiv for priority establishment; prototype implementation and evaluation are planned as future work Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) ACM classes: C.2.2; D.4.6; E.3; K.5.1 Cite as: arXiv:2604.06693 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.06693v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06693 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Amrish Baskaran [view email] [v1] Wed, 8 Apr 2026 05:16:21 UTC (456 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)