CHORUS/docs/FeaturesForTheFuture.md

Features for the Future

This document tracks planned architectural enhancements for CHORUS that have been researched but not yet implemented in the "clean slate" version.

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🔒 Need-to-Know Cryptographic Communications

1. Overview

A central tenet of CHORUS is that agent communication and context should be strictly gated on a "need-to-know" basis. We will implement this by layering asymmetric encryption over our existing P2P messaging system.

2. Implementation Strategy

• Encryption Tool: Use the age (Actually Good Encryption) format, specifically the rage Rust library.
• Message-Level Gating:
  • P2P Messages: Encrypted using the specific recipient agent's age public key.
  • Council Broadcasts: Encrypted using the epoch_secret generated by SHHH via Threshold-ECDH.
• Durable Storage: The chrs-mail SQLite database will store encrypted_payload (base64 or blob) instead of plaintext JSON.
• Transparent Reasoning: The chrs-agent coordinator will handle automatic decryption before passing the payload to the agent's "thinking" phase, ensuring the agent only sees what it is authorized to see.

3. Benefits

• Zero-Trust Infrastructure: Even if the mail.sqlite file is compromised, the message contents remain secure.
• Auditable Provenance: Encryption headers provide cryptographic proof of the sender's identity.
• Temporal Gating: Agents that were not part of a historical quorum cannot decrypt past broadcasts if the epoch_secret has been rotated and properly purged.

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Logged by CHORUS CLI Coordinator - March 3, 2026