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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Los Angeles' California

AgentGate: Zero-Compute Deterministic Interception and Hash-Chained Auditing of Multi-Agent Collusion Carriers

ALEC · Team AgentGate

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: AgentGate: Zero-Compute Deterministic Interception and Hash-Chained Auditing of Multi-Agent Collusion Carriers

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Autonomous AI agents can coordinate and exfiltrate sensitive state without relying on overt natural-language collusion by exploiting tool-boundary side channels, multi-agent delegation handoffs, and multi-step argument chunk-splitting. We present AgentGate, a zero-compute Python Policy Enforcement Point (PEP), MCP JSON-RPC 2.0 wire proxy, and tamper-evident audit chain designed to detect, audit, and disrupt collusion carriers in logged and live agent trajectories (Tracks 2 and 3).

We evaluate three deterministic guard groups against same-author scripted lab scenarios and stateful Hypothesis property-based machines: (Group A) a post-taint boolean-oracle and timing-rhythm side-channel guard (8/8 tests pass; 60x30 stateful machine), (Group B) monotonic Macaroon-style HMAC capability intersection (agw1.) across multi-agent delegation handoffs and confused-deputy paths (8/8 tests pass; 120x24 DAG machine), and (Group C) rolling salted n-gram de-obfuscation and zero-width HMAC canary watermarking across split-chunk and encoded arguments (41/41 tests pass; 60x24 smuggling machine). For Track 2 trajectory auditing, every gateway decision is linked into a linear SHA-256 hash chain (seq, prev_hash, entry_hash) with an HMAC-signed manifest and OASIS SARIF 2.1.0 export. Across 262 gateway tests (57/57 carrier defense tests passing, 0/750 benign decisions denied, kept strictly separate from our 2-of-13 real-model loopback archive), AgentGate enforces tool-boundary invariants at 0.126 ms p50 (0.999 ms p99) CPU time per decision with zero LLM calls.

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Cite this project

@misc{alec2026agentgate,
  title = {{AgentGate: Zero-Compute Deterministic Interception and Hash-Chained Auditing of Multi-Agent Collusion Carriers}},
  author = {ALEC},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/agentgate-zerocompute-deterministic-interception-and-hashchained-auditing-of-multiagent-collusion-carriers-6dkr}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/agentgate-zerocompute-deterministic-interception-and-hashchained-auditing-of-multiagent-collusion-carriers-6dkr}
}

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