A Scalable Trust Discovery Architecture for the Internet of Agents
Song Zhang and colleagues propose a three-layer registry and resolver architecture for agent discovery, addressing the part of agent protocols that tool invocation standards leave open.
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The gap in current protocols. Existing agent protocols cover tool invocation and inter-agent messaging, but leave scalable registration, trustworthy identification, and capability-oriented discovery unresolved.
Three layers. Agent Root governs the trusted registry, Agent Registry handles registration and metadata publication, and Agent Resolver performs distributed capability discovery and trust-aware resolution.
Composite identity. An agent's native identifier is bound to a trusted registry suffix to produce a globally discoverable identity, with dual certificates and multi-level authentication supporting identity trust between agents.
Prototype numbers. Average registration latency 58ms and discovery latency 25ms, sustaining more than 19,000 registrations and 29,000 discovery requests per second.
Significance. Agent-to-agent discovery is currently handled by hardcoded endpoints and ad hoc directories; this is a concrete design with measured throughput to argue against.
Abstract
The Internet of Agents is expected to enable large numbers of autonomous agents to discover, verify, and collaborate with each other across heterogeneous platforms. However, current agent protocols mainly address tool invocation and inter-agent communication, leaving scalable agent registration, trustworthy identification, and capability-oriented discovery largely unresolved. To address this, this paper proposes a scalable trust discovery architecture for the Internet of Agents. The proposed architecture adopts a hierarchical and distributed design consisting of three layers: Agent Root for trusted registry governance, Agent Registry for agent registration and metadata publication, and Agent Resolver for distributed capability discovery and trust-aware resolution. The architecture further introduces a registry-suffix-anchored composite identity scheme, which binds an agent native identifier to a trusted registry suffix to generate a globally discoverable identity. It also incorporates a dual-certificate and multi-level authentication mechanism to strengthen identity trust among agents. We implement a prototype and evaluate it through large-scale agent registration and resolution experiments. The prototype achieves an average registration latency of 58ms and an average discovery latency of 25ms, and it supports more than 19,000 registration requests per second and more than 29,000 agent discovery requests per second. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, providing a practical approach toward scalable and identity-trusted agent ecosystems in the Internet of Agents.