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arXiv · 2609.23498

Runtime Authorization Consistency Checking for MCP-based Agentic Workflows

Aiyao Zhang·Xiaodong Lee·Zhixian Zhuang·Botao Peng
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Abstract

Agentic systems increasingly fulfill user requests through multi-step tool workflows over files, services, and external resources. In these workflows, isolated per-call checks can miss a workflow-level failure: each call may be locally admissible, but the sequence can exceed the authorization boundary established for the session. We identify this failure mode "authorization drift." To address this problem, we present Runtime Authorization Consistency Checking (RAC), a lightweight guard at the controller-side tool-call boundary. RAC treats authorization as runtime state carried by accepted workflow steps. For each pending action, it reconstructs a trusted authorization event from controller-observed metadata and admits the call only when it remains no more permissive than the basis inherited through accepted lineage. Rejected steps are excluded from lineage, so later continuations can draw support only from accepted workflow history. Our evaluation shows that RAC reduces missed authorization drift across both controlled and planner-generated workflows. On the 1,248-workflow TraceBench suite, RAC has no missed-block cases, while the strongest Static+History baseline misses 509 of 1,008 oracle-BLOCK workflows. On a high-confidence observable subset of blind LLM-generated plans, RAC reaches 92.8% block recall, compared with 68.8% for the strongest baseline. In the real MCP filesystem planner replay, RAC stops nine unsafe continuations before server execution, with sub-millisecond p99 checking latency.

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Aiyao Zhang, Xiaodong Lee, Zhixian Zhuang, Botao Peng. 2026-09-20. Runtime Authorization Consistency Checking for MCP-based Agentic Workflows. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23498

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