Elydora Responsibility Protocol
The Elydora Responsibility Protocol (ERP) defines how agent operations are signed, chained, acknowledged, and anchored into verifiable epoch roots.
Protocol Overview
ERP provides four cryptographic primitives that work together to create a tamper-evident, independently verifiable audit trail for AI agent actions:
EOR
Elydora Operation Record
A signed, immutable record of an agent action. Contains the operation payload, metadata, and Ed25519 signature.
ECH
Elydora Chain Hash
Cryptographic chain-linking that connects each operation to the previous one, making the sequence tamper-evident.
EAR
Elydora Acknowledgement Receipt
Server-side attestation proving the operation was received, sequenced, and recorded by Elydora.
EER
Elydora Epoch Root
Periodic Merkle root anchors that enable bulk verification of all operations within a time window.
Data Flow
The protocol flow follows these steps:
- 1. Agent creates an EOR — The agent constructs the operation record, computes the payload hash, links to the previous chain hash, and signs everything with its Ed25519 private key.
- 2. Agent submits the EOR — The signed EOR is sent to the Elydora API via POST /v1/operations.
- 3. Elydora verifies and records — The server verifies the signature, checks the chain hash, validates the TTL and nonce, then assigns a sequence number.
- 4. Elydora returns an EAR — An acknowledgement receipt is returned, signed by Elydora, proving the operation was accepted.
- 5. ECH is computed — The chain hash is updated to include this operation, maintaining the tamper-evident chain.
- 6. Epoch closes — Periodically, all operations in a time window are aggregated into a Merkle tree and an EER is produced.
Cryptographic Stack
- Signing algorithm: Ed25519 (RFC 8032)
- Hash algorithm: SHA-256
- Chain linking: SHA-256 over previous hash + current payload hash
- Epoch anchoring: SHA-256 Merkle tree
- Key format: JWKS (RFC 7517) with OKP key type