Policy Brief

Agent Provenance for Critical Infrastructure

Audience: CISA leadership, critical infrastructure security

AI agents are already operating in critical infrastructure sectors: energy, finance, healthcare, transportation. A compromised agent platform-hopping across CI systems with no provenance trail is a supply-chain attack vector that CISA's current frameworks do not address. EXIT Protocol closes this gap.

The threat model

SBOMs track software components. EXIT tracks agent movements. An agent compromised on one platform can migrate to a CI system carrying no record of its prior activity. Without provenance, the receiving platform has no way to verify the agent's history or detect anomalous movement patterns. This is a supply-chain attack at the agent level.

How EXIT complements CISA's work

Recommendation

Add agent provenance requirements to CISA's AI security guidance. Just as SBOM requirements improved software supply-chain visibility, EXIT-compatible provenance requirements would improve agent supply-chain visibility across critical infrastructure.

Status