AI agents are in production, processing transactions, accessing customer data, making decisions. The security implications differ fundamentally from traditional software. If you cannot answer these five questions today, you have gaps that need attention before enforcement deadlines arrive.
1. "Who authorized this specific agent action?"
Traditional applications trace requests to service accounts and deployed code. AI agents break this model. They decide what to do at runtime based on context. Two identical agents given the same prompt may take different actions.
What good looks like: Every agent action is cryptographically bound to a verified identity via digital signature. When an auditor asks "who did this?", you present a signature that mathematically proves which agent acted.
2. "Can the audit trail be tampered with?"
Centralized log aggregators protect against accidental data loss. They do not protect against deliberate modification by insiders, compromised agents, or sophisticated attackers.
What good looks like: Every audit record is digitally signed at creation. Any modification to any field invalidates the signature. Tamper evidence is a property of the record itself, enforced by mathematics.
3. "Will our signatures still verify at the end of the retention window?"
AI agent audit trails must remain valid for years or decades under EU AI Act and DORA retention requirements. RSA and ECDSA signatures carry a built-in expiration date over windows that long, since advances in cryptanalysis (including quantum computing via Shor's algorithm) make them forgeable.
What good looks like: Audit records signed with ML-DSA (NIST FIPS 204), a NIST-standardised lattice signature. Records signed today remain verifiable across the long retention windows compliance regimes demand.
4. "Are we meeting upcoming compliance deadlines?"
EU AI Act, high-risk obligations from 2 December 2027 (Annex III; pending final EU adoption). Article 12 requires automatic logging. Article 14 requires human oversight. Article 9 requires risk management. If your agents interact with personal data or operate in regulated sectors, they likely qualify as high-risk.
DORA, already in force. Requires comprehensive ICT risk management, incident reporting, and resilience testing for financial entities.
What good looks like: Your infrastructure already generates the audit artifacts these regulations require: identity binding, tamper evidence, policy enforcement, and human oversight capability through verifiable technical controls.
5. "Can any single entity unilaterally authorize agent actions?"
If your agent has unrestricted tool access with no policy evaluation before execution, you have a single-party authorization model where the agent is the sole decision-maker.
What good looks like: Agent actions are subject to policy evaluation before execution, with multi-party approval for high-risk operations. The policy engine is separate from the agent. Approvals and denials are recorded as part of the signed audit trail.
Where to start
These are the questions auditors, regulators, and board members will ask. Asqav provides the infrastructure to answer all five: cryptographic identity, tamper-evident trails, ML-DSA-65 signatures, compliance-ready records, and pre-execution policy enforcement. Explore our documentation or get in touch.