Specification, Draft 07
Draft 07 of the Autonomy Trust Envelope Protocol specification, a trust layer built on hybrid classical and NIST post-quantum cryptography, is dated 2 October 2026 and is the first public draft (Drafts 00 to 06 were internal working drafts). The complete text is available as plain Markdown in one file, llms-full.txt, which is generated from spec/ATEP-Specification-Draft-07.md in the repository by a script and prefixed with a short note describing it.
Published drafts are never edited: a change is a new draft. A rendered, browsable version of the specification is not part of this site yet. Behavior that the text leaves ambiguous is decided by the test vectors, and the text then follows the vectors.
| Section | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | Abstract and status, terminology, goals and scope |
| 4 | Identity: key bundles, Agent IDs, domain records |
| 5, 6 | Envelope format (COSE_Sign inside COSE_Encrypt, deterministic CBOR) and the ATEP-1 cryptographic suite |
| 7 | Attestations, claim types, domain binding, retirement and succession, trust policy, chains |
| 8, 9 | Revocation lists; transparency log, checkpoints, optional anchor records, proofs, registry services and the log API |
| 10 | The ten step verification algorithm |
| 11 | Security considerations |
| 12, 13 | Conformance and test vectors; implementation roadmap and status |
| 16 | Design commitments against misuse (normative) |
| 17 | ATEP-R, the robotics profile |
| 18, 20, A | Related work; decisions taken during drafting; revision history |
Claim types
The claim types that attestations name under https://atep.dev/claims/ are defined in section 7 and section 17. Each of the 14 has a page with its definition, who issues it, the CDDL schema of data and its lifetime: see the claim types directory.
Licensing
The specification text is licensed CC BY 4.0 (canonical terms). Attribution line: "Autonomy Trust Envelope Protocol (ATEP), AIRAD LABS, CC BY 4.0".
Registrations
The media types application/atep+cbor and application/atep-attestation+cbor, the CBOR tag numbers and the COSE labels are provisional. None is registered with IANA, and no Internet-Draft has been submitted.