Technology

XAP Architecture

Two applications defining the Execution Authority Protocol (XAP) category: the Parent establishes the category; the continuation specifies how category membership applies to distributed enforcement as a structural property.

Diagram of the security stack showing four layers: Identity and Integrity, Authorization, XAP (highlighted as a new category for execution authority), and Operation. XAP evaluates each operation at execution time and produces a cryptographic record an independent party can verify. The diagram is annotated with the five category principles: execution-time evaluation, integrity at time of use, decision bound to evidence, proof of authorization, and proportional response.
Figure 01 Where XAP sits in the security stack. The execution authority layer operates above session-time authorization and below the operation itself, evaluating constraints per operation and producing a record an independent party can verify.
AM
XAP PARENT · YH-AMIAP-001
Autonomous Machine Identity & Authority Protocol · Filed March 2026
The Gap XAP Addresses
Identity providers authenticate machine entities. Access control systems decide whether an entity may access a resource at session establishment. Policy engines distribute rule sets. Audit and SIEM systems record events. Hardware attestation (TPM, TEE) validates platform integrity at enrollment. Each of these is solved, and each is necessary. None of them evaluate whether a specific operation should execute at the moment it is requested, against the current state of the machine, and produce a cryptographic record that an independent party can reproduce. A credential valid at issuance may be invalid at execution due to posture change, zone drift, or environmental compromise; the existing stack has no enforcement point that notices.

XAP defines a new protocol category that occupies the layer between access being granted and the operation actually executing. An autonomous machine is governed against runtime conditions at the time each operation is requested, with machine integrity validated at time of use rather than at enrollment. Each decision is bound to a cryptographic record that an independent third party can verify without access to the enforcement system. The category is complementary to authentication, access authorization, and channel security.

What the Parent Establishes
The Parent application establishes the XAP category and its defining properties: per-operation evaluation at the moment of execution, integrity evidence at time of use, cryptographic binding of decisions to runtime evidence, and an independent verification path that does not require access to the enforcement system. The category is designed to be algorithm-agnostic, preserving its verification properties across classical, hybrid, and post-quantum deployments. Specific claim language is held in the filed application and made available to qualified evaluators under NDA.
CN
CONTINUATION · YH-AMIAP-CON-1
Continuation · Filed April 2026
The Distributed Enforcement Reality
Production enforcement is never monolithic. Different components — gateways, sidecars, host-level agents, signing services, audit logs — perform different parts of governance, often procured from different vendors, operated by different teams, in different administrative domains. Distributed tracing systems (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) correlate spans across service boundaries but do not produce outputs designed for independent verification of authorization decisions. SIEM aggregates log records without ensuring the aggregated outputs meet a verification standard. A protocol category whose scope does not account for distributed enforcement would fail to match the systems it is designed to govern.

The continuation specifies how XAP category membership applies when governance is performed by cooperating distributed components rather than a single point. It establishes a verification standard that holds regardless of how many components participate, how their outputs are denominated, or whether they are operated by different entities in different administrative domains. The detailed structural requirements that make this rigorous are set out in the filed claims and made available to qualified evaluators under NDA.

Distributed Enforcement Topologies Covered
The category covers the enforcement topologies real production deployments use, including gateway-and-host architectures, CI/CD pipeline governance, multi-domain federation across administrative boundaries, serverless and event-driven execution, and resource-constrained environments. Architectural details and verification procedures are set out in the filed application and made available to qualified evaluators under NDA.
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CATEGORY · PARENT + CONTINUATION
The Execution Authority Protocol (XAP) Category

The Parent defines the category. The continuation extends it to the distributed enforcement topologies real production deployments use. Prosecution of each application is insulated from the other through a prosecution history firewall.