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ARIA — Agent Risk & Identity Authorization

No-Code Product Overview for Product Management​

1) Elevator Pitch (What we’re building)​

ARIA is an agent security and authorization platform that sits between AI agents and enterprise tools/APIs. It gives enterprises provable control over what agents can do, for whom, with which tools, under which limits—without changing existing identity or API standards. Think: an MCP-aware policy enforcement point (PEP) that adds cryptographic guardrails, verifiable authorization, and tamper-evident audit trails to every agent action.

2) Why the market needs this (Why now)​

  • AI agents act at machine speed and can chain tools in novel ways; legacy, static permissions and manual approvals don’t scale.
  • Per-user isolation is hard when one agent serves many users; typical service accounts leak context across users.
  • Compliance and audit require evidence you can prove, not logs you can argue about.
  • Procurement & risk teams are blocking agent projects until there’s a credible control plane with standards alignment (OAuth/OIDC/AuthZEN).

3) The problems ARIA solves​

  1. Cross-user data leakage when agents share broad service accounts.
  2. Unbounded or off-script actions (e.g., unexpected costs, unintended side effects).
  3. Tool/API drift (schema changes) breaking or altering behavior without visibility.
  4. Prompt/context tampering that changes what an agent thinks it should do.
  5. Weak, non-provable audits scattered across systems and easy to dispute.
  6. Lack of runtime anomaly detection specific to agent behavior.
  7. Hard-to-operate controls that aren’t compatible with existing IdP/PDP stacks.

4) What ARIA is (Overview, no code)​

  • A standards-first security layer for AI agents:

    • Authorization: OpenID AuthZEN draft-04 for PDP calls (strict boolean decisions).
    • Identity & delegation: OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693), Rich Authorization Requests (RFC 9396), OpenID Connect.

  • A gateway/PEP that verifies identity binding, capabilities, plans, context, and tool attestations before any tool call is allowed.

  • A control & audit plane that produces tamper-evident receipts for every authorized action.

  • Works alongside your existing IdP, PDP, API gateways, and tools—no protocol changes required.

5) Core capabilities (What ARIA does)​

Seven controls, in plain language:

  1. User-Bound Agent Identities Each agent instance is cryptographically bound to one user; prevents cross-user access.

  2. Tool Schema Attestation Every tool call is checked against a signed schema version/hash; drift or unapproved versions are blocked.

  3. Privacy-Preserving Capability Proofs Agents prove they hold the specific permission needed without revealing everything they can do; keeps tokens compact and private.

  4. Plan Contracts (Bounded Execution) Pre-approved steps, parameter fingerprints, and budgets; off-script actions or cost overruns are blocked automatically.

  5. Context-Root Binding A tamper-evident fingerprint of the trusted context (prompts, constraints, prior outputs) tied to the request; detects manipulation.

  6. Behavioral DNA (BDNA) Monitoring Baselines agent behavior (tool sequences/timing/error patterns) and flags drift that suggests compromise or misuse.

  7. Receipt Chains (Immutable Audit) Every decision/action emits a signed, hash-chained receipt; creates a clean, defensible audit trail.

6) How it works (at a glance, no code)​

  • Agents call tools as usual.
  • ARIA Gateway intercepts each call, verifies identity binding, tool attestation, capability proof, plan step, and context integrity, then asks the PDP (AuthZEN) for a boolean allow/deny.
  • On allow, ARIA forwards to the tool and emits a receipt; on deny, it emits a deny receipt with cause.
  • IdP issues delegation tokens (with ARIA extensions) using existing OAuth/OIDC; Membership/Graph stores user↔agent↔tool relationships.

7) Who buys it (Personas & buyers)​

  • Economic buyer: CISO or CTO (security & platform risk ownership).
  • Champions: Head of Platform/AI, Security Architecture, IAM Lead, VP Eng.
  • Influencers: Compliance/Risk, Data Protection Officer, Finance Ops (budget control), Line-of-Business owners piloting agents.

8) Primary use cases (What they’ll use it for)​

  • Customer Support Agents accessing CRM, billing, and case tools with strict per-customer isolation.
  • Finance/Procurement Agents placing orders, issuing refunds, paying invoices with per-action budgets and audit receipts.
  • IT/DevOps Agents performing controlled changes (e.g., limited S3 writes, ticket updates) with plan contracts.
  • Sales/Field Agents that aggregate customer data and take scoped actions under strict capabilities.
  • Back-office Automation (RPA modernization) where every step must be bounded and auditable.

(Verticals: financial services, healthcare, SaaS, e-commerce, manufacturing—anywhere agents touch regulated or sensitive data.)

9) Product value (Why ARIA, outcomes to expect)​

  • Provable security boundaries: Isolation and allow/deny decisions you can demonstrate, not just assert.
  • Operational confidence: Tools can update safely; ARIA detects drift before it bites.
  • Predictable spend: Plans/budgets cap exposure per action/flow.
  • Faster approvals: Compliance gets tamper-evident receipts by default, reducing audit friction.
  • Standards fit: Drops into existing IdP/PDP/tooling; no proprietary protocol lock-in.

Example KPIs to track (no inflated numbers): time-to-approve agent use cases, % of prevented cross-user attempts, PDP decision latency, # of plan violations blocked, audit preparation time, mean time to detect anomalous behavior.

10) How others try to solve this (Competitive/alternative approaches)​

A. Traditional API Gateways / WAFs

  • Strengths: mature routing, rate limiting, headers, some auth integrations.
  • Gaps: assume static app behavior; lack user-bound agents, plan contracts, context binding, or cryptographic receipts.

B. Standard IAM / IdPs / PAM

  • Strengths: strong human/service identity, SSO/MFA, role management.
  • Gaps: not built for per-call, multi-step agent toolchains, capability proofs, or schema attestation at runtime.

C. Policy Engines (e.g., generic ABAC/RBAC, OPA-style)

  • Strengths: flexible policies, decoupled decisions.
  • Gaps: need an agent-aware PEP to enforce plan steps, context roots, attestations, budgets, and to emit tamper-evident receipts.

D. SIEM / Audit Log Aggregation

  • Strengths: central visibility after the fact.
  • Gaps: logs are disputable, can be incomplete, and aren’t a control surface; no per-call cryptographic provenance.

E. Vendor-specific “agent guardrails”

  • Strengths: convenient within a single stack.
  • Gaps: siloed, limited across heterogeneous tools; rarely standards-aligned on wire; weak enterprise audit posture.

11) Why ARIA is uniquely valuable (Our differentiation)​

  • Agent-first controls designed for tool-chaining and machine-speed decisions.
  • Cryptographic enforcement (binding, attestations, proofs, receipts) rather than best-effort configs.
  • End-to-end bounded execution via plan contracts—not just “allow tool X.”
  • Context integrity (context-root binding) to counter manipulation that traditional auth can’t see.
  • Standard wire protocols (AuthZEN draft-04, OAuth/OIDC) so it fits cleanly into existing stacks.
  • Audit-complete by design: Receipts are produced on every decision, ready for compliance without extra projects.

12) What’s in scope (Features by milestone, no code)​

MVP (Phase 1)​

  • MCP-aware PEP (Gateway) enforcing: user-binding, tool attestation, sequential plan contracts, capability proofs, and receipt chains.
  • Strict AuthZEN PDP integration (boolean only).
  • IdP delegation tokens with ARIA extensions (by-reference attestations).
  • Membership/Graph for user↔agent↔tool relationships and consent.
  • Dashboards: decisions, denials, attestation mismatches, plan violations.

Phase 2 (Adoption at scale)​

  • BDNA monitoring in shadow mode → configurable enforcement.
  • Plan DAGs & parallel steps (when needed by real flows).
  • Receipt explorer (search, export, anchoring options).
  • Tenant-aware policy packs (time windows, value limits, tool classes).

Phase 3 (Enterprise hardening)​

  • Key rotation runbooks, high-availability SLAs, disaster recovery.
  • Deeper ecosystem adapters (popular CRMs, ERPs, billing).
  • Controls catalog (prebuilt policies for common use cases).

13) What we’ll need from customers (Adoption prerequisites)​

  • Existing IdP (OIDC/OAuth2) and a PDP or willingness to run a compatible one.
  • Tool owners to publish schema attestations (version + hash) to a registry.
  • Agreement on canonical tool IDs and capability naming.
  • A small set of pilot use cases to define plans/budgets and validate audit outputs.

14) Risks & mitigations​

  • Integration friction: mitigate with standards, adapters, and a guided pilot.
  • Policy complexity: provide reference policies and “good defaults.”
  • Performance sensitivity: parallelize checks and cache attestations; enforce strict SLAs.
  • Change management: receipts and dashboards to build trust with security/compliance early.

15) Crisp positioning (external-facing summary)​

  • Category: Agent Security & Authorization Platform (MCP-aware PEP).
  • Tagline: Provable authorization and audit for AI agents.
  • Value pillars: Secure-by-default, Verifiable compliance, Predictable cost, Standards-aligned.

TL;DR for PMs​

ARIA gives enterprises the missing control plane for AI agents: who an agent is acting for, what it’s allowed to do, how it must do it, how much it can spend/change, and evidence for every decision—all using the standards they already run.