Paper V — SIRP: The Network Atom
Secure Intent Routing Protocol
Normative keywords per RFC 2119/8174 (MUST/SHOULD/MAY) apply.
The Story
December 2024. A distributed AI system. A catastrophic failure.
Three agents were supposed to coordinate a complex financial operation. Agent A sent instructions to Agent B. Agent B claimed it never received them. Agent C executed based on what it thought Agent B had decided. The result: $18 million in erroneous trades.
The post-mortem was brutal:
- TCP delivered the packets (probably)
- No proof of delivery existed
- No proof of receipt existed
- Each agent's version of events contradicted the others
- The network was a black box
"We can't prove who said what to whom."
Now imagine a different architecture.
Every message between agents is a Capsule—signed, content-addressed, receipted:
{
"magic": "0x5199",
"ver": 1,
"cid": "b3:7f3a9b2c4d5e6f7a8b9c0d1e2f3a4b5c...",
"sender_did": "did:logline:agent:A",
"payload": {
"kind": "instruction",
"action": "execute_trade",
"params": {"symbol": "AAPL", "quantity": 1000}
},
"signature": "ed25519:..."
}
When Agent B receives this Capsule, it signs a Delivery Receipt:
{
"kind": "sirp.receipt.delivery.v1",
"capsule_cid": "b3:7f3a9b2c...",
"sender_did": "did:logline:agent:A",
"receiver_did": "did:logline:agent:B",
"ts_received": "2024-12-15T14:23:07.847Z",
"outcome": "DELIVERED",
"signature": "ed25519:agent_B_key"
}
Agent B cannot later claim it didn't receive the instruction. The receipt exists. The signature is verifiable. The dispute collapses into a hash comparison.
The network becomes an audit trail.
This is SIRP.
I. The Problem
Networks route packets by location. But in a world of accountable agents, location is irrelevant. What matters is:
- Who is speaking?
- What do they intend?
- Can we prove delivery?
Traditional networks provide none of this:
- IP addresses change
- Packets can be forged
- Delivery is best-effort
- Routing leaves no audit trail
When meaning must travel, it must travel as an accountable artifact.
II. The Thesis
**Route by identity, not topology. Receipt every hop. Prove delivery.**
SIRP defines:
1. Capsule — the atomic, signed, content-addressed message
2. Discovery — identity-bound DHT mapping DIDs to endpoints
3. TAL — transport abstraction (UDP, QUIC, WebSocket, TCP)
4. Receipts — cryptographic proof of relay and delivery
SIRP is to the network what the Gate is to execution: nothing meaningful happens without artifacts.