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@article{209356,
        author = {Varuni H. Sukhtankar},
        title = {Autonomous Identity Lifecycle Governance: An Architecture for Post-Termination Identity Sanitation},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {5},
        pages = {1511-1521},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=209356},
        abstract = {Autonomous AI agents and Non-Human Identities (NHIs) introduce lifecycle security challenges beyond conventional identity provisioning, authorization, and deprovisioning. During execution, an autonomous identity may create credentials, delegated authority, sessions, dependencies, and trust relationships that persist beyond its intended operational lifetime. This paper proposes the Autonomous Identity Lifecycle (AIL), a lifecycle-oriented architecture for governing autonomous identities from intent and identity synthesis through execution, termination, Identity Sanitation, and verified closure. AIL treat’s identity termination and verified closure as distinct security outcomes. Identity Sanitation addresses the identification and appropriate disposition of residual security state, while Closure Evidence and Assurance provides evidence for validating that closure conditions have been satisfied. The architecture also introduces Identity-BOM as a lifecycle provenance structure for tracing identities, authorizations, delegations, dependencies, trust relationships, credentials, sessions, and related security artifacts throughout the identity lifecycle. In addition, the established principle of Least Persistence is applied through Identity Time-to-Live (I-TTL) to constrain the temporal lifetime of identity-related authority. The proposed architecture provides a foundation for governing post-termination identity security state; empirical validation and prototype implementation remain future work.},
        keywords = {Autonomous Identity Lifecycle, Identity-BOM, Identity Governance, Identity Sanitation, Non-Human Identity.},
        month = {October},
        }