ECAP is a protocol, not a AgentWarden feature
The Ethical Crawler Agreement Protocol started as a standalone IETF individual draft, independent of AgentWarden as a product. AgentWarden is an implementation of ECAP, not its owner.
What ECAP solves
A cryptographic zero-trust handshake between an agent operator and a target system: before an agent may read or write, it presents a short-lived, signed token that binds identity, scope, and permitted actions.
Cryptographically verified identity
Every token is signed with ECDSA (P-256, ES256) and bound to a verified operator identity, instead of relying on a forgeable user-agent string.
Least privilege, not blanket access
A token carries an explicit scope list (such as wiki.read, wiki.write) instead of blanket access, and is limited to a few minutes by default.
Chain of evidence, not a claim
Every handshake, successful or rejected, is recorded in a tamper-evident, hash-chained log, verifiable after the fact.
Interoperable, not a solo effort
ECAP is designed as a standalone implementation of a zero-trust handshake, compatible with emerging standards such as Web Bot Auth and the IETF AIPREF working group, rather than a competing effort.
The Trust Registry
The strategic outlook: a federated, cross-organization reputation layer for agent identities, modeled on MISP-style threat sharing between CERTs.
Today the Trust Registry is isolated per customer: an identity flagged as malicious is blocked immediately and exclusively within that customer's own infrastructure. The planned next step: every tarpit catch and every confirmed abuse alert could, with the operator's consent, flow into a shared network as a pseudonymized fingerprint (hashed key, category, timestamp, no raw traffic), so that an identity exposed at one customer is automatically blocked at all others. Data format and transport would follow the open STIX 2.1 and TAXII 2.1 standards, so existing SOC tooling landscapes could connect without a custom integration.
A purely profit-driven operator would undermine the neutrality a reputation network needs. The intent is to anchor the registry as an independent, non-profit-adjacent structure in the medium term, with AgentWarden as the largest operational contributor, not the sole owner of the raw data.
ECAP started in 2025 as the IETF individual draft draft-schulze-ecap-00 by Adnan Schulze-Hüneke, and has since matured into a standalone, publicly archived reference specification, ECAP/1.0: specification, manifest, and policy format are open on GitHub, with a permanent, citable Zenodo DOI and additional archiving in Software Heritage.
AgentWarden provides the production-grade reference implementation of the handshake and the audit chain: a growing automated test suite spanning several hundred cases, real signature verification, real chain verification, and real policy evaluation against a live policy engine rather than mocks on the cryptographic core paths.
Help shape the standard
If you want to test ECAP in your own infrastructure or contribute to the Trust Registry, reach out directly.