Pramana: A Protocol-Layer Treatment of Claim Verification in Autonomous Agent Networks

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 19 May 2026] Pramana: A Protocol-Layer Treatment of Claim Verification in Autonomous Agent Networks Ravi Kiran Kadaboina Autonomous agents deployed in regulated domains must produce a verification artifact per consequential output: a record an auditor can re-execute offline, capturing what was claimed, against what source, by whom, when, and how. Production verification today splits into two unstandardized halves. Probabilistic verdict patterns (self-consistency voting, reviewer LLM ensembles) produce judgments, not artifacts. Artifact-producing patterns (RAG, tool-augmented traces, generator-verifier loops) produce vendor-specific records no external auditor can reconstruct without bespoke integration. Pramana defines the missing wire format. Every consequential agent output is wrapped in a typed ClaimAttestation with one of four variants (measurement, inference, analogy, citation), each paired with a verify() operation against the recorded source. verify() is deterministic for MeasurementClaim and CitationClaim. For InferenceClaim and AnalogyClaim, determinism is conditional on the oracle (audit-replayable when LLM-backed). The four-way typology derives from classical Indian epistemology (pramana, valid means of knowledge). The lifecycle is specified in TLA+ and exhaustively verified under TLC across three symmetry-reduced models: 38,563 distinct reachable states, zero invariant violations. The Python reference implementation passes 84 tests. An A2A and MCP wire-extension manifest layers three deployment-grade invariants: reachability, SLA bound, and offline re-verifiability. An exploratory pilot (n=100, 2,275 reviewer calls) probes LLM-as-judge in code generation. The strongest observation is a 40-percentage-point raw FPR delta across corpora, consistent with reference-solution quality contributing significantly. The pilot does not validate Pramana on its own; the structural argument and formal verification do that. Comments: 23 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables, 42 references Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) ACM classes: I.2.11; D.2.4; F.3.1; K.4.1 Cite as: arXiv:2605.20312 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.20312v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20312 Focus to learn more Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20283646 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ravi Kiran Kadaboina [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 17:00:33 UTC (148 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.LO cs.MA 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?)