flashyid-spec — delegation/1

The vendor-neutral specification for cryptographically provable delegated authority for agents — the identity layer of the agentic internet — for anyone who needs to issue, carry or check a chain of authority that runs human → organisation → agent → sub-agent → session and can never grow on the way down.

This repository holds the spec, a JSON Schema, test vectors and a dependency-free checker. The implementation — an OIDC provider and the @flashyid/sdk grant kernel — lives in FlashyLabs/flashyid; every rule here is seeded from it and says so.

Nothing to install. Node 22 or later.

node vendor-delegation.mjs check vectors/valid/three-hop.json
node vendor-delegation.mjs check vectors/invalid/widened-scope.json
npm test

The first prints the authority in effect at the leaf and exits 0. The second names the refusal (scope_widened at chain[1].scopes) and exits 1. The third runs every vector and every rule with node --test.

Attenuation only. A child grant may carry a subset of its parent's scopes, a cap no higher, an expiry no later and the same or a narrower purpose. Any widening is refused with a named reason — never clamped, never averaged. An agent can act on a person's authority and can never exceed it.

Enforcement before minting. Every grant names, in enforcedBy, the https endpoint that checks it before anything acts on it. A grant with no checker is refused. Authority that nothing checks is theatre.

Bind subject to holder. A verifier walks the chain: each grant's issuer is the holder of the grant above, the root is a person or an organisation and never a machine, and the principal acting must be the leaf's subject. A valid signature over somebody else's chain authorises nothing.

And the rest of the estate's doctrine that follows from those: every grant expires and is revocable, revocation is immediate and walks down, caps are integer minor units, unknown keys are refused unless x- prefixed, and the checker refuses rather than guesses.

It does not verify a signature. delegation/1 fixes what is signed — the canonical JSON of the grant without its signature field — and mandates no algorithm and no key distribution; those are the implementation's. The vectors are unsigned (signature: null) for that reason, and the CLI says signed: no — structural check only so nobody mistakes a structural pass for a cryptographic one.

• Reference implementation: FlashyLabs/flashyid — the OIDC provider, @flashyid/sdk (the grant kernel this spec is seeded from), and the rail issuance, consent and grant surfaces.
• Sibling standards in this estate, by name: intent/1, ritual/1, aao/0.1, trust/1. A delegation/1 root is typically the accountableTo of an aao/0.1 charter.

delegation/1 is the identity layer of Web 4 — the agentic internet as a stack of open protocols. The human map of the whole stack is web4; its machine twin is stack.json, served at /.well-known/stack.json. This repository serves its own institutional front door — the same config-driven, dependency-free door every protocol repository in the estate serves — generated into site/ by node scripts/build-site.mjs from site.config.json and its vendored inputs. It is committed here and, once deployed, is served at https://flashylabs.github.io/flashyid-spec/ (committed as of 2026-09-29, not yet fetched).

Status: draft. No independent adopter yet; the first is the gate before this is called a standard.

Licensed under Apache-2.0 (holder Flashy Labs); the estate register in flashyos tools/estate-licences.mjs is the authority.