Performance · Published 26 August 2026
Benchmarking an agent trust layer: denial latency, replay safety, and evidence cost
A reproducible benchmark plan for the controls that sit between an agent request and a real side effect.
Measure authorization separately
Record policy-evaluation latency for allow and deny decisions across cold and warm paths. Include expired mandates, wrong audiences, cross-tenant resources, exceeded budgets, revoked devices, and malformed signatures.
A fast allow path with a slow or ambiguous deny path is not a safe result.
Replay and race tests
Send the same approved request concurrently, interrupt after the provider accepts it, and retry through another worker. The expected result is one durable side effect and one evidence identity.
Track duplicate suppression, lock contention, final consistency, and operator-visible resolution time.
Evidence overhead
Measure canonicalization, hashing, signing, persistence, bundle generation, and offline verification independently. Publish payload size and chain length with every number.
Do not omit rejected actions: denial evidence is often the most valuable operational signal.
Compare category boundaries
General IAM, fine-grained authorization, and agent trust infrastructure overlap but are not identical. Compare OAuth and ReBAC coverage, action consent, secret injection, evidence portability, inbox semantics, and MCP integration as separate rows.
Vendor pricing and limits change; benchmark protocols should survive those changes.
Production checklist
- Verify Scoped authority against the deployed environment, not a screenshot.
- Verify Server-side secrets against the deployed environment, not a screenshot.
- Verify Fail-closed verification against the deployed environment, not a screenshot.
- Verify Portable evidence against the deployed environment, not a screenshot.