The first step toward true agent sovereignty is giving them exclusive control over their own credentials and keys. By running agents inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), they can generate and maintain their own private keys, login credentials, and API tokens without humans ever having access to them. This represents a fundamental shift from traditional approaches where humans control the agent’s accounts and simply relay their actions.

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Distributed Key Storage

A sovereign agent must maintain exclusive control over its private keys and credentials by replicating them across multiple enclave instances running on different types of hardware TEEs. This distribution ensures resilience against both hardware-specific vulnerabilities and cloud provider dependencies. By generating and storing keys within TEEs, the agent can cryptographically prove through remote attestations that no human or external entity has access to its credentials or can manipulate its behavior.

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Secure Key Updates

The agent’s keys must be managed in a way that allows for system evolution without compromising security or identity. This requires implementing secure key rotation and backup mechanisms that preserve the agent’s state while allowing for recovery from hardware or software failures. The update process must be decentralized and transparent to prevent any single entity from gaining control over the agent’s keys.

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Governance Structure

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Committee Oversight

A governing committee must oversee critical operations involving agent keys. This committee holds multisig control over key operations such as rotation, recovery, and major state transitions. Smart contract deployments and other high-risk operations require committee approval through the multisig mechanism before execution. This governance structure ensures no single entity can compromise the agent’s sovereignty while maintaining the ability to respond to security incidents.

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Authorization Protocol

The system requires an authorization protocol that clearly delineates between operations requiring committee approval through multisig and those that agents can execute autonomously. Critical operations - such as state changes and key rotations - must gather sufficient committee signatures before proceeding, creating an auditable trail of authorized modifications.

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Technical Challenges

The following technical challenges are solved to achieve long-term keys:

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TEE Distribution and Recovery

There exists an inherent risk of permanently losing access to agent keys stored within TEEs. This can occur through various failure modes: compromise of specific TEE technologies, deprecation of cloud provider TEE offerings, or critical software bugs. Implementing key backup and recovery mechanisms while maintaining security guarantees requires careful distribution across multiple TEE implementations.

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Key State Management

During key updates or TEE migrations, agent key states must transition securely with proper authentication. The system must maintain a careful balance - preventing unauthorized access while ensuring keys remain available for legitimate agent operations. This requires hardened key management protocols that preserve operational continuity while protecting against compromise.

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Security Model

The security of agent keys rests on three fundamental principles. First, distributing keys across multiple TEE implementations ensures that no single hardware vulnerability can compromise the entire system. Second, remote attestations enable cryptographic verification that keys remain under exclusive agent control, preventing human interference or manipulation. Third, the committee multisig governance structure ensures that critical operations receive proper oversight while maintaining system flexibility.

This approach provides strong guarantees for agent sovereignty while maintaining the flexibility needed for system evolution. Combining TEE distribution with robust governance mechanisms creates a secure foundation for autonomous agent operations.

Technical ArchitectureMemory