[Web-bot-auth] Re: Interest in the human-principal layer above bot authentication

[~blake <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dick,

Thank you, that was the pointer I needed. Having now read
draft-hardt-oauth-aauth-protocol-09 and aauth.dev, signed requests
over RFC 9421 instead of bearer tokens, and OAuth being the wrong
shape for MCP, both match what I kept running into.

AAuth already carries a human principal in the Person and Missions,
well beyond Web Bot Auth's key-only model. My consent-settlement work
is about a different human role; not the accountable operator behind
the agent, but the data subject an identity attribute is about, who
issues a scoped, revocable consent grant for a specific read of their
own attributes and takes a share of what the reader pays. That
subject is usually a third party to the agent. 

Specifically, can AAuth's Person and Mission machinery carry a consent
grant issued by someone who is not the agent's Person, or does
subject-side consent and settlement sit as a separate layer beside
AAuth? As I read AAuth-09 it establishes authorisation but does not
price or settle a read, which is the piece I have written up in
draft-morrison-consent-settlement.

Thibault, yes, Section 6.2 is
draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-protocol, and the
transport-versus-payload split is the seam. The signature
authenticates the agent and stays person-agnostic, while subject
identity and settlement bind at the payload layer, as UCP does with
buyer identity. Consent-settlement lives at that payload layer. Of
your pointers, crawl-payment and draft-klrc-aiagent-auth are closest
to what I am doing, so I will follow those first; the case I care
about is the cross-domain read of a third party's attributes, which
is why it sits beside the established-trust-domain work rather than
inside it. A pointer to the crawl-payment thread would be welcome.

Cheers,

Blake