​

Approval Lifecycle & State Machine

       ┌───────────┐
       │  PENDING  │  (Tool request persisted in SQLite)
       └─────┬─────┘
             │
      ┌──────┴──────┐
      │             │
      ▼             ▼
┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐
│ APPROVED  │ │ REJECTED  │  (Human reviews in Dashboard)
└─────┬─────┘ └───────────┘
      │
      ▼
┌───────────┐
│ CONSUMED  │ (Agent retries with credential; tool executes)
└───────────┘

​

The 5 Approval States

1. PENDING: The agent has initiated the call. Dmint stopped execution before calling downstream logic and stored the exact request envelope in Core SQLite.
2. APPROVED: An authorized authority (such as a human in dmint dashboard or an administrative script) inspected the payload and generated an Ed25519 signature.
3. REJECTED: The reviewer explicitly denied the request. Any subsequent retry with this request ID will fail closed.
4. CONSUMED: The approved assertion was submitted, verified, and used to execute the underlying tool. The assertion is now permanently invalidated and cannot be replayed.
5. EXPIRED: The assertion exceeded its configured time-to-live (expires_at) before being executed.

​

The Approval Assertion

{
  "version": 1,
  "approval_id": "appr_01j7v0q...",
  "request_id": "req_01j7v0p...",
  "request_fingerprint": "e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855",
  "policy_digest": "4a7d1ed414474e4033ac29ccb8653d9b",
  "authority": {
    "issuer": "dmint-dashboard",
    "audience": "dmint/dashboard/v1",
    "algorithm": "ed25519",
    "public_key": "base64_encoded_key..."
  },
  "issued_at": 1726910000,
  "expires_at": 1726910300,
  "signature": "base64_signature..."
}

​

Critical Security Fields

• request_fingerprint: Ensures the approval is valid only for the exact arguments that the human saw on screen.
• policy_digest: Contains the SHA-256 digest of policy.json at the time of approval. If someone alters the policy file before the agent executes, the approval is automatically invalidated.
• signature: Cryptographic Ed25519 signature over the canonical assertion payload. Cannot be forged.

​

Atomic Single-Use Consumption

# During tool retry:
store.consume_approved(
    approval_id="appr_01j7v0q...",
    request_fingerprint="e3b0c442...",
    policy_digest="4a7d1ed4..."
)

UPDATE approvals 
SET state = 'consumed', consumed_at = ? 
WHERE approval_id = ? AND state = 'approved';

AuthorizationError: DMT_APPROVAL_CONSUMED

​

Next Steps