InterSAGE: The Secure and Verifiable Interoperability Protocol for An Internet of Agents

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 13 Aug 2026] InterSAGE: The Secure and Verifiable Interoperability Protocol for An Internet of Agents Zhenhua Zou, Sheng Guo, Qiuyang Zhan, Lepeng Zhao, Shuo Li, Zhuotao Liu The emerging Internet of Agents enables LLM-powered agents to discover peers, invoke tools, and delegate tasks across organizational boundaries. Existing protocols increasingly define how agents exchange messages, but not how an agent proves its identity, authorization, advertised capabilities, or accountability after delegation. We present InterSAGE, a trust-native protocol suite that supplies this missing security substrate alongside, rather than in place of, communication protocols. InterSAGE comprises four layers: Persistent Identity, Discovery, Trust Negotiation, and Accountability. Its four core primitives are: (1) Agent Identity Cards that bind developer, code package, operator, and deployment context; (2) capability-aware discovery using DID-bound Verifiable Credential manifests; (3) trust negotiation combining monotonic capability attenuation with two-tier access control; and (4) kernel-mediated cryptographic audit trails that bind usage, delegation, and execution traces to agent identity without a consensus ledger. InterSAGE is designed to complement MCP, A2A, ANP, and AG-UI, allowing communication protocols to evolve independently while keeping trust semantics explicit, portable, and verifiable. We compare InterSAGE with more than 50 efforts spanning agent protocols, decentralized identity, OAuth/OIDC extensions, zero-trust governance, delegation, and audit architectures. We show that no prior architecture jointly enforces persistent identity, capability-aware discovery, trust negotiation, and accountability as a unified four-layer trust substrate for secure agent interoperability. Comments: 35 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables. Positioning paper Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) Cite as: arXiv:2608.13030 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.13030v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.13030 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Qiuyang Zhan [view email] [v1] Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:13 UTC (97 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.MA cs.NI 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?)