News · September 2026
When the Witness Is Also the Suspect, in IEEE Internet Computing
“When the Witness Is Also the Suspect: The Case for Hardware-Rooting the Evidence That AI Agents Leave Behind” is online as an early-access article in IEEE Internet Computing, doi:10.1109/MIC.2026.3734398. The volume and issue will be assigned when the article is placed in a print issue.
An AI agent's signed, append-only record of what it did, under whose authority, and with what outcome is a self-report. The witness is also the suspect. The article argues that such a record earns weight only when it is bound to evidence the agent cannot forge about itself: the platform's remote attestation, appraised by a verifier that is not the agent. It sets out how an Action Evidence Package can travel as application-layer evidence over the conveyances defined by the IETF's Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) architecture, and what a verifier can and cannot conclude from the composition.
The feasibility check uses an emulated software TPM. That demonstrates the composition mechanics, not a hardware guarantee; a run on manufacturer-backed silicon is the next step, and the article says so. The companion specification is the individual Internet-Draft draft-sokolov-rats-aep-composition, revision -06, which has not been adopted by any working group.
The article is published under IEEE's standard terms. The preprint of the underlying note remains open on Zenodo, 10.5281/zenodo.20818672.