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Technical Charter: cA2A

Proposed hosting: Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). Status: Pre-acceptance draft: effective upon host organization acceptance.

Note for external contributors: This charter is a working draft and has not yet been accepted by a host organization. Governance terms, IP policy, and trademark ownership described here are proposed, not final. Do not assume binding foundation commitments until formal acceptance.

Version: 0.1

1. Mission

The cA2A project develops and maintains an open trust profile for confidential agent-to-agent delegation, layered on top of the A2A protocol. The mission is to make inter-agent delegation cryptographically verifiable and confidential by any party, without trusting the operator, without a competing transport, and without lock-in to any silicon vendor, cloud provider, or AI platform.

2. Scope

The project includes:

  • cA2A Profile: the binding that layers attested, attenuated delegation, sealed peer channels, and provenance records on A2A. Published as a profile, not a protocol.
  • cA2A Runtime: the reference open-source implementation of peer-delegation enforcement and the sealed peer channel (ca2a-runtime).
  • cA2A Verify: the offline verifier for delegation chains and the delegation DAG (ca2a-verify).
  • TRACE A2A profile integration: the delegation-link fields added to TRACE records (see agentrust-io/trace-spec).
  • agent-manifest binding: reuse of the signed, attenuated delegation chain (see agentrust-io/agent-manifest).

Out of scope: the A2A transport itself, agent identity issuance beyond delegation, AI model governance, hardware TEE platform SDKs, and any attempt to rebuild or fork A2A.

3. Technical Steering Committee

Upon host organization acceptance, governance transitions from the current Project Lead model to a Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

Composition: 3-7 members. No single organization may hold more than 40% of TSC seats. The founding Project Lead (Imran Siddique, OPAQUE Systems) holds one founding seat for the v1.0 release cycle.

Election: TSC members are elected annually by active contributors (at least one merged pull request in the preceding 12 months). Each contributor has one vote.

Quorum: Two-thirds of TSC members must participate for a vote to be valid.

Decisions:

  • Patch releases and editorial changes: simple TSC majority
  • Minor releases (new primitives, new TEE providers): two-thirds TSC majority + 7-day public comment
  • Breaking profile changes (delegation credential format, TRACE link fields): two-thirds TSC majority + 30-day public comment + explicit migration guide

Meetings: Monthly public TSC meeting. Notes published within 5 business days.

4. Intellectual Property Policy

All contributions must be made under the terms of LICENSE. Contributors must sign commits with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). No contribution may incorporate material covered by a patent the contributor is unwilling to license royalty-free to conforming implementations.

5. Trademark Policy

"cA2A" and "cA2A-compatible" as project and conformance marks are currently held by OPAQUE Systems, Inc. Upon host organization acceptance, trademark ownership transfers to AAIF under their standard trademark policy.

Use of "cA2A-compatible" to describe a deployment requires that the implementation satisfies the attestation, attenuation, and provenance requirements defined in the project documentation for the version being claimed.

6. Relationship to other projects

cA2A builds on and does not replace:

  • A2A (Agent2Agent, Linux Foundation / AAIF): the underlying agent-to-agent transport that cA2A profiles with attestation and attenuated delegation
  • TRACE (agentrust-io/trace-spec): provenance record emitted per delegation hop
  • agent-manifest (agentrust-io/agent-manifest): the signed, attenuated delegation chain
  • cMCP (agentrust-io/cmcp): shared TEE provider abstraction, Cedar policy engine, and audit chain
  • RATS / EAT (RFC 9711) and SCITT: attestation evidence and transparency formats

7. Transition timeline

Milestone Target
v0.1 profile draft and delegation-chain verifier Q3 2026
Runtime peer-delegation enforcement and sealed channel Q4 2026
AAIF project proposal submission Q4 2026
v1.0 stable profile under TSC governance 2027

8. Amendments

Amendments to this charter require a two-thirds TSC majority and a 30-day public comment period. Before host organization acceptance, amendments require Project Lead approval and 14-day notice to contributors.