Skillsets on the Chain: A Blockchain-based Zero-Trust Framework for Agentic AI Networking

Agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems rely heavily on third-party skillset implementations and distributed multi-agent collaboration, yet they face major claim-to-capability inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities under trust-by-declaration assumptions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes TrustAgentNet, a dual-tier blockchain-secured zero-trust framework. Specifically, a global Chain of Skillsets (CoS) governs the lifecycle of skillset metadata with protocols empowered by specialized agents to enforce off-chain auditing while maintaining lightweight on-chain cryptographic consensus. Furthermore, transient, task-oriented Chains of Collaboration (CoC) are dynamically established to enable trustless distributed multi-agent collaboration. Theoretical analysis of the three-way trade-off among security level, task performance, and resource overhead is provided and empirically validated. Experimental results on a hardware prototype demonstrate that compared with no-blockchain trust-by-default baselines, the zero-trust overhead of TrustAgentNet is dominated by off-chain inference, while the blockchain layer incurs minor ledger costs via the ledger-IPFS storage and on/off-chain integration design. Crucially, the proposed verification pipeline achieves a flawless 100% accuracy across 50 AI models, correctly validating 40 honest skillsets and intercepting 10 adversarial ones, and generalizes to non-AI domains with an 83.91% accuracy and a 0.85 F1-score across 1478 features from 171 ClawHub skills. Adversarial experiments further show that TrustAgentNet enables autonomous skillset self-recovery against various malicious attacks.