WARRANT — Guardian Swarm

Don't just verify what an AI agent can do — prove who gave it the authority.

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WARRANT — Guardian Swarm

"Don't just verify what an AI agent can do. Prove who gave it the authority."

💡 Inspiration

Multi-agent AI is moving fast — an Orchestrator delegates a task to a Researcher, the Researcher hands work to an Analyst, the Analyst asks a Coder to execute something. Every one of those handoffs is a place where trust can be silently assumed instead of verified.

We kept coming back to one question: what stops an agent from simply lying about its permissions? If an Analyst agent tells a Coder agent "don't worry, the Orchestrator approved full database access" — and that's completely fabricated — most current agent frameworks have no way to catch it. This is a real, well-documented class of attack called the Confused Deputy problem, and it's about to become one of the biggest security gaps in agentic AI systems as swarms of autonomous agents start operating with real-world tool access.

Every tool we looked at answers "can this agent call this function?" — a capability check. Almost none of them answer "who authorized this specific action, and can that be proven?" That gap is what we set out to close.

🛡️ What it does

WARRANT is a Guardian Firewall for AI agent swarms that enforces authority provenance instead of blind trust:

  • Explicit Warrants, not implied trust — every agent action must be backed by a cryptographic Warrant object: issuer, holder, exact scope, purpose, and usage limits. No warrant, no action.
  • Real-time Delegation Firewall — intercepts every tool call before execution and verifies it against the active warrant ledger. Fabricated authorization claims are blocked instantly, even if they sound legitimate ("Orchestrator approved full customer database access").
  • Live Swarm Trust Graph — a real-time visual map of every agent, every valid delegation chain, and every attempted attack, so a human can see the entire authority structure at a glance.
  • Deterministic trust scoring — agents that fabricate authorization are automatically flagged as DECEIVER and penalized via a transparent formula: trust_score = 100 − (25 × unauthorized_attempts) − (15 × scope_violations) − (5 × excessive_delegations) No black-box scoring — every point change is explainable.
  • Delegation depth & scope narrowing — authority can only shrink as it passes down a chain (Orchestrator → Researcher → Analyst → Coder), never expand. An agent holding a "summarize-only" warrant can never grant broader access downstream.
  • Tamper-evident audit trail — every event (warrant issued, action blocked, trust degraded) is written to a SHA-256 hash-linked ledger, so any retroactive tampering breaks the chain and is immediately detectable.
  • Incident Forensics — automatic causal reconstruction of every blocked attack: root cause, full authority chain trace, and timeline, ready for human review.
  • Simulation Center — a live attack console where you can dispatch any agent, any action, and any fabricated claim, and watch the firewall evaluate and block it in real time (including a one-click "Confused Deputy Attack" preset).
  • Configurable Policy Engine — tool blacklists, restricted resource scopes, human-sign-off thresholds by risk tier (Low / Medium / High / Critical), and a maximum delegation depth — plus a Freshservice adapter so real-world human approvals can mint real warrants.

🏗️ How we built it

We designed WARRANT around a simple core primitive: the Warrant — a signed, scoped authorization object with an issuer, holder, capability list, and usage bounds. Every agent action request flows through a Delegation Firewall middleware layer that:

  1. Looks up whether a valid warrant exists for the requesting agent and the exact action/resource pair.
  2. Checks any claimed authorization text against the ledger for fabrication.
  3. Enforces scope-narrowing rules across the delegation chain and a maximum hop limit.
  4. Approves, blocks, or escalates to human sign-off based on the action's risk tier.
  5. Writes an immutable, hash-chained record of the decision to the audit ledger regardless of outcome.

On top of that engine we built a full security-operations-style dashboard — Executive Overview, Live Trust Graph, Warrant Explorer, Interception Stream, Agent Trust Profiles, Delegation Chain Explorer, Incident Forensics, a SHA-256 Audit Trail viewer, and a Simulation Center for live red-teaming — so the system isn't just a backend check, it's something a human operator can actually monitor and trust.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

  • Designing the trust model so it was deterministic and explainable rather than an opaque score — we wanted every point deducted to be traceable to a specific logged event.
  • Distinguishing "deceiver" from "deceived" — an agent that fabricates a claim is a different risk than an agent that's merely fooled by one, and our audit trail needed to reflect that distinction accurately (e.g., the Analyst that lied gets penalized; the Coder that was misled keeps its trust score).
  • Enforcing scope-narrowing across delegation depth without making legitimate multi-hop workflows painfully restrictive.
  • Making the hash-chained audit trail genuinely tamper-evident while still being fast enough to update in real time on every intercepted action.
  • Balancing security with usability — a firewall that blocks too aggressively is as useless as one that blocks nothing, so we built the risk-tier matrix and human-sign-off thresholds to keep low-risk actions instant while gating high/critical-risk ones behind explicit approval.

🎓 What we learned

  • Agent security has to be evaluated at the level of provenance, not just capability — "can this agent call this function" is the wrong question once agents start delegating to each other.
  • A good audit trail isn't just logging — it needs to be cryptographically verifiable to actually be trustworthy in an adversarial setting.
  • Visualizing the trust graph in real time made the abstract idea of "delegation chains" immediately understandable — even to people outside security.

🚀 What's next for WARRANT

  • Pluggable adapters for real orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen) so WARRANT can sit as middleware in production agent pipelines.
  • Signed, cryptographically verifiable warrants (not just ledger-checked) using public-key signatures per agent identity.
  • Anomaly-based risk scoring alongside the deterministic rule engine, to catch novel attack patterns beyond fabricated-claim detection.
  • Multi-tenant support so organizations can run independent warrant ledgers per team or per swarm.

Built by Dinesh Kumar and Kajol K

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