SUDP: Secret-Use Delegation Protocol for Agentic Systems

Abstract: Agentic systems increasingly act with user secrets for APIs, messaging platforms, and cloud services. Today's bearer-secret interfaces implement authorization by exposure: enabling action often means placing a reusable secret, or a reusable artifact derived from it, within a model-steerable boundary, so a transient prompt-injection or tool-side compromise becomes durable account compromise. Existing defenses cover adjacent pieces such as secret storage, scoped delegation, sender-constrained tokens, and runtime monitoring, but leave the combined agentic obligation without a common specification: an untrusted autonomous requester should be able to cause a user-authorized secret-backed operation without exposing reusable authority to the requester. We formalize this problem as Agent Secret Use (ASU). From ASU we derive a security-property taxonomy that separates the problem's structural obligations from the realization-level robustness conditions any concrete construction must establish, enabling principled comparison of existing agentic-secret defenses against a problem-grounded specification. We propose the Secret-Use Delegation Protocol (SUDP), a three-role protocol realizing ASU: a requester proposes a canonical operation; the user authorizes it with a fresh authenticator-backed grant; and a custodian redeems the grant once to perform the bounded use, so reusable authority never crosses the requester boundary. We specialize SUDP for agentic deployments: agents propose operations; they do not retrieve secrets. Under explicit assumptions, we show that SUDP satisfies the ASU requirements: authorization is verifiable, operation-bound, and single-use. SUDP also provides storage confidentiality and wrapping-epoch key isolation under stated sealing and erasure assumptions; plaintext-level forward secrecy of the underlying secret additionally requires the environment to rotate and revoke it.