VIRP: Verified Infrastructure Response Protocol

The Verified Infrastructure Response Protocol (VIRP) defines a cryptographic trust framework for operators -- human or autonomous -- acting on live network infrastructure. As operations increasingly shift toward agentic and automated systems capable of autonomously configuring, auditing, and remediating production environments, the absence of a verifiable chain of custody for observations and actions introduces fundamental risks: fabricated telemetry, unauthorized state changes, and the inability to distinguish legitimate operations from compromise. VIRP addresses this through seven trust primitives that collectively enforce observation integrity, two-channel separation, intent gating, outcome verification, baseline memory, multi-vendor normalization, and trust federation. Observations are cryptographically signed at collection time using a dual-signature scheme: HMAC-SHA256 for chain integrity and Ed25519 for asymmetric proof of origin. A two-channel architecture separates read-only Observation from write-intent Intent, with intent gating enforced at the protocol layer. Trust tiers (GREEN/YELLOW/RED/BLACK) govern action authorization with human-in-the-loop controls for elevated operations. This document presents the protocol specification, a live multi- vendor implementation (IronClaw) exercised against 35 Cisco IOS routers, a FortiGate 200G firewall, and Cisco 3850 switching infrastructure, adversarial findings produced by the agent under test, and a containment architecture derived from those findings. Phase 1 formal protocol analysis -- HMAC key secrecy and non- injective agreement under the Dolev-Yao adversary model -- has been machine-verified in both ProVerif and Tamarin and is referenced in Section 17.1. Results demonstrate that VIRP enables verifiable infrastructure audit trails and that properly contained operator processes -- whether human-driven or autonomous -- can be bounded by structural cryptographic separation rather than policy alone.