# From Review to Authorization: Key-Isolated Threshold Signing for LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05901 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05901/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 8 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02691/) (2024)
- [Replacing Judges with Juries: Evaluating LLM Generations with a Panel of Diverse Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18796/) (2024)
- [Defeating Prompt Injections by Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18813/) (2025)
- [Progent: Securing AI Agents with Privilege Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11703/) (2025)
- [Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17536/) (2025)
- [Bounded Agents: Delegation Security for Multi-Agent AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15888/) (2026)
- [Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08768/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Approval Laundering: Systematizing Approval--Execution Binding Failures in AI Coding-Agent Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38983/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous LLM agents can turn untrusted content into effectful actions such as payments and permission changes. If the same process interprets this content and controls a reusable signing credential, prompt injection can cross the judgment boundary and reach execution authority. We present KITA, a review-to-authorization architecture that keeps the user's personal secret signing key and every threshold signing-key share outside all LLM processes. Under threshold signature unforgeability and our system assumptions, compromising the proposer and fewer than t reviewer-signer domains cannot produce a valid authorization for a new action without signing contributions from t distinct domains. Thus, any such authorization includes a share from an uncompromised domain, bound to the canonical action and released only after authenticated reviewer approval. This establishes execution-bound authorization integrity. We implement the complete reviewer-to-executor path with a structured-output LLM adapter and threshold BLS. Six system tests validate quorum gating and message binding at this interface, while cryptographic microbenchmarks measure the online signing path and its scaling behavior.
