Authority must be explicit.
How AI systems are given authority, with zero trust as concrete boundaries. A research area, not a product.
Four boundaries a request should cross.
Explicit identity
Who is asking? A named principal from a trusted source, not a self-applied label.
Limited permissions
What may it touch? A named resource and action, not carried to other machines.
Approval tied to a change and destination
Who agreed to what, and where? Exact, expiring, separate from the proposer.
Checks at execution boundaries
Where is it enforced? At the moment of action, by whatever holds access.
Research direction, with no product claim.
Vraelis has no identity, access or authorization product, and makes no zero trust claim.
One narrow boundary exists in the Vraelis Contour experiment: release authorization with separate publisher, deployer and approver roles, and destination-bound approval naming the environment and resource, with a 60 second age limit, checked before serving. One check, not a machine trust system.
What is still open.
Disconnected operation
What a machine does when it cannot reach its approval service.
Single use approval
Consuming an approval exactly once, at the boundary.
Two approval domains
Supplier and operator approvals bound to one release.
Revocation
How fast a withdrawn approval reaches every boundary.
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