From CRUD to Autonomous Agents: Formal Validation and Zero-Trust Security for Semantic Gateways in AI-Native Enterprise Systems

As large language models transition from bounded generative engines to agents with expansive execution privileges, AI going out of control precipitates a fundamental crisis in artificial intelligence security. Existing defense architectures heavily rely on empirical semantic guardrails and probabilistic large model adjudicators, mechanisms that fail to provide deterministic security lower bounds when facing complex semantic symbol decoupling attacks. To overcome this empirical semantic guardrail dilemma, this paper proposes a new security paradigm for agents based on the fundamental limitations of logical reasoning. Based on this paradigm, we further introduce an executable Proof-Constrained Action (ePCA) framework with a neural symbolic isolation architecture. This framework abandons semantic trust in natural language, forcing agents to losslessly formalize their intentions into first-order logical mathematical constraints before performing physical operations. Empirical evaluations of macroscopic and microscopic two-dimensional dynamic adversarial systems demonstrate that our formal verification mechanism achieves zero attack success rate and zero false positive rate across the evaluated scenarios, with extremely low computational latency. This research provides a conditional formal foundation under explicit system assumptions and an engineering paradigm for constructing the underlying defense foundation for future intelligent systems.

Authorizing Large Language Model (LLM)-driven agents to dynamically invoke tools and access protected resources introduces significant security risks, and the risks grow dramatically as agents engage in multi-turn conversations and scale toward distributed collaboration. A compromised or malicious agentic application can tamper with tool calls, falsify results, or request permissions beyond the scope of the subject's intended tasks, which could go unnoticed with current delegated authorization flows given their lack of visibility into the original subject's intent. In light of this, we make the following contributions towards Continuous Agent Semantic Authorization (CASA). First, we propose a hybrid runtime enforcement model that combines deterministic and semantic controls enabled by a zero-trust interception layer. Five deterministic controls enforce structural and data-integrity guarantees over the message flow, while a semantic inspection layer evaluates whether tool call choices align with the intended tasks commissioned to the agent. Second, differently from prior Task-Based Access Control (TBAC) techniques that operate on single-turn interactions, we decompose the semantic layer into two stages: i) a task-extraction step that distills the subject's objectives from multi-turn conversations at the interception layer, and ii) a task-tool semantic matching step at the authorization server that evaluates whether the requested tools are appropriate for the extracted tasks. Third, we extend the ASTRA dataset that we introduced in a prior work, by generating novel conversation-tool datasets with multi-turn interactions containing relevant and irrelevant tool calls for a given task. Lastly, we provide the first experimental results for TBAC under multi-turn conversations.

LLM-based agentic systems are rapidly evolving to perform complex autonomous tasks through dynamic tool invocation, stateful memory management, and multi-agent collaboration. However, this semantics-driven execution paradigm creates a severe semantic gap between low-level physical events and high-level execution intent, making post-hoc security auditing fundamentally difficult. Existing representation mechanisms, including static SBOMs and runtime logs, provide only fragmented evidence and fail to capture cognitive-state evolution, capability bindings, persistent memory contamination, and cascading risk propagation across interacting agents. To bridge this gap, we propose Agent-BOM, a unified structural representation for agent security auditing. Agent-BOM models an agentic system as a hierarchical attributed directed graph that separates static capability bases, such as models, tools, and long-term memory, from dynamic runtime semantic states, such as goals, reasoning trajectories, and actions. These layers are connected through semantic edges and security attributes, transforming fragmented execution traces into queryable audit paths. Building on Agent-BOM, we develop a graph-query-based paradigm for path-level risk assessment and instantiate it with the OWASP Agentic Top 10. We further implement an auditing plugin in the OpenClaw environment to construct Agent-BOM from live executions. Evaluation on representative real-world agentic attack scenarios shows that Agent-BOM can reconstruct stealthy attack chains, including cross-session memory poisoning and tool misuse, capability supply-chain hijacking and unexpected code execution, multi-agent ecosystem hijacking, and privilege and trust abuse. These results demonstrate that Agent-BOM provides a unified and auditable foundation for root-cause analysis and security adjudication in complex agentic ecosystems.