Separating Disclosure from Authorization: Field-Tier Minimization for Agent Action Mediation
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
A system that authorizes an action must see enough of it to decide, and a system that attests to its decision must record enough to be audited. Both pressures push raw action parameters -- recipients, payment memos, record identifiers -- into an append-only ledger that cannot delete them. We show the two are separable. We classify each parameter field, not each action class, into three tiers: fields a policy may legitimately match on, which cross raw; fields that are policy-relevant but identifying, which cross only as projections such as an email domain or a templated route shape; and fields with no legitimate policy use, which never leave the workload. The central property is that the ledger's commitment is a canonical digest of the full, unminimized parameters, computed before minimization runs. The commitment is therefore independent of the tier table: reclassifying a field changes what is disclosed without invalidating a historical entry, reopening a hash, or altering what an offline verifier checks. Tier table, policy schema and wire schema are generated from one per-action declaration, so the deciding and recording parties cannot hold different rules. We then address a question the architecture forces: which party should compute each attested fact? We argue it is settled by which party could lie about it undetectably, and derive three answers within one request -- the client computes the parameter digest, being the only party holding the data; it is structurally prevented from naming the definition that governed it, since that would write a false statement into a signed ledger; and it attests which tier table it applied, so divergence is detectable. We give a leakage analysis of each projection, report an incident in which a first-cut projection preserved the identifier it was written to remove, and state the residual trust the design does not eliminate.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.
Builds on
No reference list yet.
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.