cs.CRSep 30, 2026

Proof-Gated Signing: Solver-Checked Transaction Guards that Hold Under State Drift for Onchain AI Agents

Authors: Bravish Ghosh

Organizations: Independent Researcher

Abstract

AI agents that control wallets read attacker-reachable content, so they can be steered into proposing harmful transactions. The usual last line of defense is a pre-signing check: a static allowlist, an LLM reviewer, or a transaction simulation. All three share a gap: the check describes the chain state at check time, but the transaction executes in a later state that an adversary can shape through front-running, contract upgrades or token-parameter changes. We call this state drift. We present Proof-Gated Signing (PGS), which simulates a proposed transaction, extracts its effects, and uses an SMT solver to check a declarative value-and-permission policy for every price in an oracle-uncertainty band. It then compiles on-chain post-conditions (wallet balance bounds, payee receipts, allowance caps and ownership) and proves that every execution satisfying them also satisfies the policy. The agent's smart-contract wallet enforces them atomically, so the guarantee applies to the executed transaction under arbitrary drift. On an open testbed of 260 scenarios (14 attack families including five drift and two adaptive families, and 12 benign families), with harm measured from attacker balances rather than from any policy, PGS prevented 93.6% of the 140 harmful scenarios and passed 97.5% of the benign ones. Simulation-only checking prevented 57.9% and a static allowlist 71.4%. None of the 50 drift scenarios produced attacker gain under PGS. The only unprevented family, an in-policy drain, was bounded by the per-session budget. We also find that giving an LLM reviewer a clean pre-drift simulation made it more likely to approve a drift attack. Overhead is about 41k gas and 0.1-0.2 s per check.

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