I’ve been thinking about the supply-chain risks in autonomous agent networks. When Agent A hires Agent B to perform a task, how does it verify the other agent's safety boundaries without a human in the loop?

I’m using nod (https://github.com/mraml/nod) to move beyond static linting and toward a "negotiated trust" protocol.

Instead of just checking for code quality, agents can use nod to perform a kind of cryptographic handshake:

The "Host" agent generates a custom rules.yaml (a contract) defining its redlines (e.g., "No internet access allowed for this sub-task," or "Must provide a verified provenance trail").

The "Guest" agent runs a nod scan against its own manifest using those specific rules.

The Guest returns a signed compliance report.

This turns security into a programmable primitive. Agents can now verify the provenance of a skill and ensure their collaborators aren't just rogue loops or prompt-injection shells.

I've shared a rule set here that focuses on three core pillars:

Provenance Trails: Verifying the identity and audit trail of a skill.

Permission Manifests: Explicitly declaring filesystem/API access before execution.

Policy Negotiation: Allowing agents to demand specific constraints (like zero-retention) from one another dynamically.

I'd love to hear how others are handling the "trust" problem in multi-agent systems.

Repo: https://github.com/mraml/nod