Agent Location Verification

How autonomous agents prove where they’re running

In Development — Agent location verification is under active development. This guide describes the intended architecture.

Agent Location Verification

As autonomous agents become more prevalent — AI agents, trading bots, automated services, IoT devices — there’s growing need to verify where these agents operate. This guide covers how agents use the location proof framework to attest their geographic position.

Why Agent Location Matters

Regulatory Compliance

AI agents processing financial data may need to prove they run in licensed jurisdictions. Healthcare agents must demonstrate they operate within HIPAA-compliant regions. Data sovereignty requirements increasingly apply to automated systems, not just human users.

Trust and Transparency

Users interacting with agents want assurance about where their data is processed. A European user may require that an AI agent handling their request operates within the EU. Location proofs provide verifiable transparency.

Service Level Agreements

Agents promising regional availability or low-latency access can prove they actually run in promised locations, not in distant data centers claiming otherwise.

Jurisdictional Operations

Some automated operations are only legal in specific locations. An agent must prove it operates from an authorized jurisdiction before executing restricted actions.

The Agent Location Flow

Agents use the infrastructure plugin to collect location evidence and produce proofs:

1. Evidence Collection

   The infrastructure plugin gathers location evidence from the agent’s operating environment — network topology, hosting metadata, latency measurements, and other contextual signals

2. Artifact Signing

   The agent bundles the collected evidence into a location proof artifact and signs it with its identity

3. Evidence Evaluation

   Astral Verify analyzes the evidence, checking for consistency and assigning confidence scores based on evidence quality and diversity

4. Location Record Creation

   If evaluation passes, a verified location record is created that can be used with Astral’s geospatial policy engine

Evidence Sources for Agents

Unlike mobile devices with GPS and cellular signals, server-based agents have different evidence available:

Evidence Type	Description
Network Topology	Traceroute data, AS paths, peering relationships
Hosting Metadata	Cloud provider region, availability zone, data center identifiers
Latency Measurements	Round-trip times to known geographic reference points
IP Geolocation	Location data associated with the agent’s IP address
Operational Context	Deployment configuration, infrastructure provider attestations

The infrastructure plugin collects and packages these signals. Multiple corroborating sources increase confidence in the claimed location.

Periodic Verification

Unlike user location proofs (typically one-time, per-action), agent location often requires continuous or periodic verification. An agent that proved its location yesterday might have migrated today.

Agents can maintain fresh location proofs by:

• Collecting evidence on a regular schedule
• Refreshing proofs before they expire
• Responding to on-demand verification requests

The appropriate frequency depends on the use case. High-security applications may require hourly verification, while others might accept daily or weekly proofs.

Multi-Region Agents

Some agent deployments span multiple geographic regions for redundancy, load balancing, or regulatory reasons. Multi-region proofs verify that an agent system operates across distinct locations simultaneously.

This is relevant for:

• Distributed agent networks requiring geographic diversity
• Failover configurations with agents in multiple regions
• Regulatory requirements mandating presence in specific jurisdictions
• Decentralization guarantees proving no single geographic point of failure

The infrastructure plugin can coordinate evidence collection across multiple deployment locations to produce unified multi-region attestations.

Integration with Policy Engine

Once an agent has a verified location proof, it can participate in location-gated operations:

• Prove compliance with jurisdictional requirements before executing sensitive operations
• Demonstrate geographic distribution as part of decentralization guarantees
• Satisfy data sovereignty requirements for processing user data
• Meet SLA commitments about regional availability

The verified location feeds into Astral’s geospatial policy engine, enabling the same spatial operations available to user location proofs — containment checks, distance calculations, and policy attestations.

Security Considerations

Agent location verification faces unique challenges:

• No GPS — Servers lack the positioning hardware available on mobile devices
• Virtualization — Cloud infrastructure can obscure physical location
• Migration — Agents can move between regions, requiring fresh proofs
• Collusion — Hosting providers could potentially assist in location spoofing

The multi-source evidence approach addresses these by requiring corroboration across independent signals. Evidence diversity makes comprehensive spoofing significantly harder.

What’s Next

The infrastructure plugin and agent verification workflows are in active development. Code examples and integration guides will be released as the components become available.

For updates, follow the roadmap or join the community.

Back to: Location Proofs

Learn about the location proof framework