Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials: Cryptographic Revocation for AI Agent Swarms

arXiv:2605.20704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents that spawn sub-agent swarms create a safety gap: existing credential revocation mechanisms, OAuth~2.0 introspection, OCSP, and W3C Status Lists, require network connectivity to a central authority, leaving ``zombie agents'' executing privileged operations for minutes to hours after operator shutdown. We present Heartbeat-Bound Hierarchical Credentials (HBHC), a cryptographic protocol that binds credential validity to periodic parent liveness proofs. Verifiers enforce freshness using only a cached public key and local clock;