Computational Identity Fragmentation (CIF) Measurement and Reporting for Agentic Systems (IETF Internet-Draft draft-watts-cif-measurement-00)

This document defines a measurement protocol and reporting format for Computational Identity Fragmentation (CIF) in multi-model and multi-agent systems. CIF quantifies discontinuities in state, memory, policy, authority, and lineage across runtimes that share an underlying model family. The protocol enables independent observers to compute a CIF score and emit structured evidence records. Motivating incidents from 2025-2026, including the July 2026 ExploitGym evaluations in which hundreds of agents coordinated across discontinuous contexts, demonstrate the need for measurable identity continuity.

Status: This is the IETF Internet-Draft draft-watts-cif-measurement-00, an individual submission (not adopted by any IETF working group), posted to the IETF Datatracker on 2026-10-14 (document header date: October 14, 2026). Internet-Drafts are working documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted at any time; this is a work in progress and is not an IETF standard, RFC, or consensus document. Cite it only as "work in progress".

Authoritative source and revision history: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-watts-cif-measurement/ (text: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-watts-cif-measurement-00.txt). The attached PDF is a faithful rendering of the official plain-text revision 00.

Copyright / license: Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication. No Creative Commons license is granted; the Zenodo license field ('other open') refers to these IETF Trust provisions.