Why TLS Attestations?
Motivation
Agents need reliable, verifiable sources of information about the external world. Regular APIs and websites don’t provide secure, verifiable data feeds. While some high-stakes data sources like price oracles and weather services provide cryptographically signed data that agents can directly verify, most web content lacks built-in verification.
Current Landscape
High-Stakes Data Sources
A small subset of data providers, primarily in finance and critical infrastructure, have implemented robust verification mechanisms. Decentralized price oracles used in DeFi applications provide cryptographically signed price feeds that agents can directly verify. Similar systems exist for weather data, sports results, and other high-stakes information where data integrity is paramount. These systems demonstrate the feasibility of verifiable data feeds but represent a tiny fraction of the information agents need to interact with the world.
Web Content Challenge
The vast majority of web content lacks any built-in verification mechanism. When an agent queries an API or scrapes a website, it has no cryptographic guarantee that the returned data hasn’t been tampered with or manipulated. This creates a critical vulnerability - any entity controlling the data pathway between the source and the agent can potentially alter the agent’s perception of reality.
Security Implications
Decision Integrity
When agents make autonomous decisions based on unverified data, the integrity of those decisions becomes suspect. An agent trading assets based on manipulated price data or moderating content based on falsified context could take actions that appear rational from its perspective but are fundamentally compromised by bad input data.
Attack Vectors
The lack of verifiable data creates multiple attack vectors:
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Man-in-the-middle attacks on API responses
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Targeted manipulation of specific data points to influence agent behavior
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Wholesale fabrication of false context to prompt particular agent actions
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Replay attacks using stale but valid data
Until we solve the challenge of verifiable world state data, sovereign agents will remain vulnerable to manipulation through their information inputs. Building this infrastructure is as critical as developing agent capabilities themselves - an agent can only be as reliable as the information it bases its decisions on.