Open protocol
IETF Internet-DraftCC0 specYour agent says it was allowed to act.
GAP is how anyone checks that claim.
GAP (Governed Action Protocol) is the open format that lets an auditor, a partner, or a customer verify an AI agent's permission to act, without trusting you or SynOI. Any actor, AI agent, device, industrial controller, MCP tool server, declares what it can do, receives a grant, invokes the capability, and produces a signed receipt proving the action happened and was authorized.
The protocol is open under CC0: any party can implement it, fork it, or verify against it independently. The IETF draft (draft-shovan-gap-00) is submitted as an Individual Internet-Draft. The SynOI Gateway is the reference implementation.
npm install @synoi/gap@1.2.0
Protocol lifecycle
Declare. Grant. Invoke. Receipt.
01
Declare
An actor publishes a capability declaration: what it can do, what it requires, what it promises. The declaration is a signed CDRO (Content-addressed, Deterministic, Replayable Object) with a stable OID.
02
Grant
A governing authority issues a signed grant to the actor: permission to invoke a specific capability, under stated conditions, for a bounded scope. Grants are revocable.
03
Invoke
The actor presents its grant at invocation time. The gateway validates the grant, evaluates tenant policy, and either permits, denies, or routes to human approval.
04
Receipt
Every gate decision produces a GapDecisionReceipt: canonical JSON body, hybrid Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65 signature, content-addressed OID. Verifiable offline by anyone.
Protocol scope
One envelope. Every actor type.
Content-addressed objects (CDROs)
Every declaration, grant, and receipt is a Content-addressed, Deterministic, Replayable Object. SHA-256 OID derived from canonical form. Same content, same OID, across any implementation and any time.
Hybrid signing (Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65)
Conformance tier L4 requires hybrid Ed25519 (RFC 8032) + ML-DSA-65 (NIST FIPS 204) signatures. Classical and post-quantum in one signature today; no migration needed when quantum attacks mature.
Multi-stage human-in-the-loop (HITL) choreography
GAP specifies the channel adapter contract for human-approval workflows: mobile, Slack, SMS, desktop, email. The receipt carries the full approval chain -- who, when, which surface.
Federated revocation (L1 to L3)
Three revocation tiers: actor-local, tenant-wide, and network-wide. Revocation propagates through the OID Resolver. Receipts issued before revocation remain valid; new invocations see the revoked state.
Authorized-axis classification
GAP defines a third state axis beyond observed/expected: authorized. A receipt that matches policy is authorized. Orphaned actions (no matching grant) are blockable at the gateway. The receipt proves the authorization chain.
Conformance tiers L1 to L4
L1: CDRO validation. L2: grant lifecycle + policy. L3: HITL channels. L4: hybrid signatures + authorized axis + federated revocation. Implementors can ship L1 and progress upward.
Standards
Composing existing standards, not replacing them.
GAP is designed to compose with the existing standards stack: IETF for the wire format and identity, NIST for cryptography, CSA for AI governance controls. It is not a competing standard -- it is the glue layer for AI-agent actions that existing standards do not address.
RFC 8032 (Ed25519)
Classical signature in the hybrid pair
NIST FIPS 204 (ML-DSA-65)
Post-quantum component of the hybrid pair
SHA-256 (FIPS 180-4)
OID derivation over canonical form
RFC 3339
Timestamps in all GAP objects
IETF draft-shovan-gap-00
The protocol spec itself (Individual Draft)
CSA AI Controls Matrix
Alignment target for GAP conformance tiers
Implement GAP
Three ways to build on GAP.
@synoi/gap@1.2.0
Apache-2.0TypeScript
Type library for all GAP objects: declarations, grants, invocations, receipts. Use in any TypeScript project.
@synoi/sraid@0.2.0
MITTypeScript
SRAID L0 object layer: CDRO construction, OID derivation, canonical JSON, Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65 signature verification. Verify-only: signing happens in the gateway, not this library.
@synoi/verify@0.2.0
Apache-2.0TypeScript
Offline receipt verifier, plus @synoi/verify-core@0.1.0 (Apache-2.0) for embedding verification in your own tooling. No SynOI account or network call required.
@synoi/oid-resolver@0.2.0
AGPL-3.0-or-laterTypeScript
L1 resolver: given an OID, returns canonical locations, revocation status, and the supersession chain.
SynOI Gateway
AGPL-3.0TypeScript
The reference GAP implementation. AGPL-3.0-or-later open source; a commercial license is available for proprietary deployments.
Conformance
SynOI Gateway's own conformance, self-reported.
The reference implementation runs the same conformance suite any other GAP implementation can run against itself. Full tier definitions and the badge artifact are on the conformance page.
Build on an open protocol.
The spec is CC0: public domain, no attribution required. Implement it. Fork it. Extend it. The reference implementation is the SynOI Gateway; the moat is the hosted services, not the protocol.