Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials: Cryptographic Revocation for AI Agent Swarms

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 20 May 2026] Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials: Cryptographic Revocation for AI Agent Swarms Saurabh Deochake Autonomous AI agents that spawn sub-agent swarms create a safety gap: existing credential revocation mechanisms, OAuth~2.0 introspection, OCSP, and W3C Status Lists, require network connectivity to a central authority, leaving ``zombie agents'' executing privileged operations for minutes to hours after operator shutdown. We present Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials (HBHC), a cryptographic protocol that binds credential validity to periodic parent liveness proofs. Verifiers enforce freshness using only a cached public key and local clock; no network round-trip is required. When heartbeat generation ceases, all descendant credentials become unusable within a deterministically bounded window W_z \le W_{\max} + \Delta_h + \epsilon, conditional on bounded clock skew and parent keys held in secure enclaves. Evaluation at the protocol layer and with real LLM-backed agent swarms (GPT-4o-mini) demonstrates a 90\times reduction in the zombie window over OAuth~2.0, 0.26~ms full authentication in Rust, 18,000+ verifications per second under concurrent HTTP load, and stable per-verification latency from 10 to 10,000 agents. Real-agent experiments show 0.71\% end-to-end overhead on tool calls, zero post-revocation tool calls under prompt injection that bypasses application-layer guardrails, and cascading revocation across a 49-agent four-level hierarchy within the theoretical bound. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2605.20704 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.20704v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20704 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Saurabh Deochake [view email] [v1] Wed, 20 May 2026 05:03:03 UTC (27 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI 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?)