Regulatory
EU AI Act, DORA, PSD3, NIS2, FedRAMP and 9 more frameworks ask for evidence the protocol already produces. Certification is the bridge.
Certification program
Conformance you can replay with public keys alone.
Five tiers, 133 black-box fixtures, 289 control mappings across 249 frameworks. Every claim at every tier is a signed artefact a regulator or auditor can verify offline. The protocol is Apache 2.0; certification is the only commercial layer.
Why certify
Three pressures, one artefact.
Procurement
Regulated buyers' procurement teams ask: "show us a signed conformance report you didn't write yourself." L3 / L4 are exactly that.
Trust
Public-key-verifiable claims defeat the "trust us" failure mode. Anyone can replay a certification artefact end-to-end.
KYE™ Academy™ authority tracks
Five tracks to make AI agents governable.
The KYE™ Academy™ certifies the people who make AI agents governable. Each track targets one role on the path from a deployed agent to a replay-verifiable authority claim, and each ends at a credential the capstone exam recognises. Pick the track that matches what you ship.
KYE™ for AI Builders
Ship skills and agents bound to a Skill Authority Manifest — purpose, tool scope, finality, evidence, revocation — so the agent's authority is declared, not assumed.
KYE™ for GRC / Risk
Map agent authority to controls and verify a signed Evidence Pack™ offline with public keys alone. The audit becomes a replay, not a meeting.
KYE™ for Sector Experts
Productise your governance expertise into a KYE-Powered Pack™ through the Sector Pack Foundry™ — your framework, the protocol's authority spine.
KYE™ for SIs / Consultants
Deliver multi-week authority implementations with the partner playbook and earn a registry-listed implementer badge clients can verify.
KYE™ Certified Agentic Governance Practitioner™
The capstone credential — proof you can take an agent from deployment to a defensible, replay-verifiable authority claim end-to-end.
The ladder
Five tiers, each one a public claim.
- L0Declared — you publish a profile statement. No verification, no listing. The honest baseline; useful for early-stage integrations and roadmaps.
- L1KYE™ Self-Tested™ — run the 129-fixture conformance pack locally and self-declare. Available today.
- L2KYE™ Self-Attested™ — signed self-attestation (Ed25519, JWS) bundled with fixture results. Available today; program verifies the signature.
- L3KYE™ Conformant™ — program review of schema + endpoint + behaviour + evidence shape + error codes + edge cases. Program in development; opens with v1.1.
- L4KYE™ Certified™ — third-party-audited certification by an approved audit firm; annual revalidation. Program in development; first audit firms onboarding with v1.1.
Capability-scoped Conformance badges
Within each tier, an implementation can carry capability-scoped marks. Each badge attests to a defined slice of the conformance pack — not the whole thing — so an implementation can grow its claims one capability at a time.
KYE™ Core Conformant™ Core authority, delegation, scope, state, audit, decision-code conformance against the Core fixture set. Program in development
KYE™ Authority Conformant™ Authority Finality™ binding — actor · on-behalf-of · capability · scope · state · audit — tested end-to-end. Program in development
KYE™ Capability Conformant™ Capability registry, grant, invocation, quarantine and cascade fixtures all pass. Program in development
KYE™ Evidence Conformant™ Evidence Pack™ generation, signing, replay and OSCAL projection conformance. Program in development
Capability-scoped badges are still in development. They become live once the public conformance program opens registration and the per-capability fixture pack is frozen. Until then, only the five tiers above are issued. Capability badges, when issued, will be versioned, time-limited, and link to a public verification record at /badges/{badge_id}/verify showing implementation, profile version, test-suite version, issued / expires dates, and revocation status.
The badge artwork — embeddable shields
These are the canonical badge templates. A per-customer badge is stamped from one of these shields plus a signed Evidence Pack™ record, then served from registry.kye.dev/badges/{badge_id}.svg with a public verification link. The shields below are the templates those instances render from — one per level in the ladder.
Self-asserted — free, run the open pack, no program review.
Program-verified conformance (L3) — the umbrella mark plus capability- and profile-scoped variants.
Certified (L4) — third-party-audited, listed in the public registry.
Embed your earned badge once issued (replace the level + your verification URL):
<a href="https://registry.kye.dev/badges/{badge_id}/verify">
<img src="https://registry.kye.dev/badges/{badge_id}.svg" alt="KYE™ Conformant" height="24" />
</a>135 conformance fixtures
Black-box, deterministic, replayable.
The conformance pack is 133 black-box fixtures grouped into seven families. Each fixture takes a signed input, expects a deterministic output, and is replayable offline using the published key set. No fixture depends on hosted infrastructure; conformance is reproducible on a laptop.
- Identity & URN — entity creation, URN parsing, class taxonomy, alias resolution, trust-domain assertions.
- Delegation chain — chain construction, attenuation rules, parent ⊇ child enforcement, SCA-at-the-edge propagation.
- Authority grants — capability binding, scope predicate evaluation, revocation, time-bound expiry.
- State & lifecycle — state transitions, quarantine, suspension, replay, recovery.
- Decision & runtime —
/v1/runtime/authorizecontract, decision codes, constraint emission, latency envelope. - Evidence & audit — append-only chain integrity, evidence-pack composition, OSCAL projection, public-key replay.
- Cascade & recovery — cascade propagation properties (timing assertions only; mechanism is proprietary).
289 control mappings
249 frameworks, one rail.
Conformance projects through the KYE™ Compliance Mapping Rail™ into 266 named controls across 249 frameworks. The same evidence pack satisfies multiple frameworks; you do not run separate audits for the same artefact.
- SOC 2 (TSC 2017) · ISO 27001:2022 · ISO 42001 · PCI DSS 4.0
- PSD2 / PSD3 · DORA · NIS2 · EU AI Act
- NIST AI RMF · NIST CSF 2.0 · NIST 800-207 (Zero Trust)
- GDPR · FedRAMP Moderate / High · HIPAA · MiCA · IEC 62443 · 42 CFR Part 2
Approved audit firms
L4 audits, by firms a regulator already accepts.
L4 audits are run by independent firms approved by the KYE Protocol™ program. Approval criteria: SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / EU AI Act-notified-body credentials, prior regulated-sector audit experience, and a signed audit-firm agreement that aligns scope, evidence handling, and report format. Audit firms do not pay to be listed; partners and end customers select from the published list.
The approved-audit-firm roster opens with the v1.1 release. Firms interested in joining should contact the program via the link below.
Maintaining certification
Cadence + change-notification.
- M1L1 / L2 self-tiers. Re-run fixtures whenever your integration changes; resubmit signed report. No fixed cadence.
- M2L3 KYE™ Conformant™. Notify the program on any breaking change. Program spot-checks 10% of L3 partners per quarter. Listing flagged if checks fail.
- M3L4 KYE™ Certified™. Annual revalidation by your audit firm. Listing carries the last-revalidation date. Lapsed certifications drop to L3 status until refreshed.
- M4Spec version bumps. Major-version bumps (v1 → v2) require re-certification within 12 months. Minor bumps are additive; no re-cert.
Start
Begin certification.
For most teams, the path is L1 first (run fixtures, find gaps), then L2 (sign + submit), then L3 (program review). L4 is the destination, not the starting point.
Ready to see your AI agents flagged?
Start in shadow mode. We’ll deliver your first Evidence Pack™ in 4–8 weeks.
Canonical KYE™ surfaces referenced on this page: KYE Protocol™.