VISTA: Verifiable Infrastructure for Secure & Transparent Agents

Modern AI agents pose serious challenges to trust, traceability, and compliance in digital systems. While foundation models are evolving rapidly, the systems they operate in often lack the guardrails needed to verify agent identity, ensure auditability, and align behavior with organizational or regulatory norms. We introduce VISTA (Verifiable Infrastructure for Secure & Transparent Agents), a modular framework that guarantees agent-level verifiability through five interoperable layers: Identity, Execution, Audit, Escalation, and Ethics.VISTA is designed for compatibility with centralized platforms, enabling institutions to embed decentralized trust checkpoints without sacrificing control. The architecture draws upon decentralized identifiers (Sporny et al., 2021), post-quantum cryptography (Chen et al., 2016), secure enclaves (Costan & Devadas, 2016), and hybrid blockchain principles (Marar & Marar, 2020). We simulate VISTA in a compliance agent use case to show how modular policy enforcement enhances accountability without introducing significant overhead. The framework aims to bridge emerging agent ecosystems with the need for trustworthy, auditable, and ethically aligned infrastructure.