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draft-kushwaha-scim-agent-governance-00

Status: Active individual draft · Checked 18 October 2026

An optional extension to the Agent resource. It adds the things operations teams ask for: a richer lifecycle than on and off, a validity window and a record of human oversight.

The problem it points at

The introduction says discussion on the SCIM working group mailing list, after the joint draft appeared, raised governance concerns once agents move from a record into daily operation: telling reversible suspension from final decommissioning, freezing an agent during a security investigation while keeping the evidence, recording how much human oversight an agent has, bounding the period in which it is meant to run, and locating its credential information.

Five attributes

• lifecycleState: five states (established, active, suspended, quarantined, archived) with a fixed transition graph. Required if the extension is used.
• autonomyLevel: autonomous, semiAutonomous or supervised.
• validFrom and validTo: the period in which the agent is intended to operate.
• credentialDiscoveryUri: where to find a document describing how the agent can bind credentials.

Three design principles

1. Provisioning layer only. Every attribute is a fact about the agent that stays true whatever protocol the agent later uses. Authorization inputs, credential artifacts and real-time risk signals are left out.
2. Grounded value sets. The lifecycle states come from the identity information lifecycle in ISO/IEC 24760-1, with one agent-specific addition, quarantined.
3. Readable by other protocols. The values are defined independently of SCIM so that, for example, an OAuth claim could carry them.

What it leaves out on purpose

An earlier proposal included an effectiveTrustLevel attribute with values such as high, medium and low. The draft excludes it. Authorization, credential management and real-time signaling are also out of scope. For fast notification, the draft says deployments that use an event framework such as the Shared Signals Framework should emit an event when an agent enters or leaves quarantined, or enters archived, because SCIM's polling-style change propagation is not suited to real-time alerts.

Why it matters for offboarding

The governance draft is the first to describe, in detail, what "switched off" can mean for an agent. Suspension is reversible. Quarantine blocks all access and preserves the record unchanged. Archive is terminal. Our offboarding checklist uses the same distinctions.

Status

Individual Internet-Draft, Informational, no formal standing. It depends on the joint draft's Agent resource, so if that changes, this one has to change too.

Facts on this page come from the text of the draft and its datatracker page, read on 18 October 2026. Drafts change, so check the datatracker for the current state. This site is independent and not affiliated with the IETF.

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