CAPMAS: Capability-Based Delegation of Privileges in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Agentic systems require secure and efficient delegation of privileges across multiple collaborating agents. Existing approaches fall into two categories. Some propagate user identities directly to agents, obscuring accountability and creating persistent over-privilege risks that are amplified by the non-deterministic behaviour of AI agents. Others rely on continuous synchronization with a central Identity and Access Management (IAM) provider, introducing additional latency and communication overhead. We present CAPMAS, a novel architecture for secure end-to-end query execution in multi-agent systems. CAPMAS newly combines a contrastive learning-based semantic scoping pipeline that maps natural-language queries to bounded privilege sets before execution with expressive Macaroon-based tokens that enable offline, tamper-evident delegation with monotonic privilege reduction across agents. By decoupling authentication and delegation enforcement from agent reasoning, CAPMAS enables practical agentic execution while enforcing strict least-privilege guarantees. By eliminating synchronous delegation exchanges with the IAM, CAPMAS yields 30 times faster delegation operations, 2 times less delegation-oriented latency and up to 3 times lower bandwidth usage than the OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693). Its semantic scoping pipeline achieves over 90% perfect privilege-bundle retrieval within 17 milliseconds on enterprise-scale API schemas containing over 3,100 endpoints, while reducing unnecessary privileges by 99.5% when compared to systems that propagate all the user's privileges to agents.