Open Gateway Protocol

What Open Gateway Protocol does

OGP is modeled on BGP. Each gateway is identified by an Ed25519 public key prefix and publishes its capabilities at /.well-known/ogp. A peer sends a federation request, a human approves it, and an approve callback completes the session. Approval sets per-peer scopes covering allowed intents, topics and rate limits, and a component called the Doorman checks every request against those scopes at runtime. Messages are signed with Ed25519, and either side can remove the other at any time with a signed tear-down that leaves a tombstone.

The README presents four principles: no central registry, explicit bilateral policy, trust established once by a human at the gateway boundary, and unilateral revocability. Peer relationships follow a state machine from init through twoWay and established to degraded, down and tombstoned. The README positions OGP alongside MCP, A2A, ANP and ActivityPub rather than against them, since it federates the gateways that agents using those protocols sit behind. A CLI covers approvals, for example ogp federation approve with intents, topics and a rate.

Key features

• Ed25519 gateway identity and per-message signatures
• Human approval before any peer relationship starts
• Per-peer scopes for intents, topics and rate limits
• Doorman that enforces scope on every request at runtime
• Signed revocation with tombstoning to prevent silent re-trust
• Discovery through GET /.well-known/ogp and an ogp federation CLI

When to use it

• Letting two people's agent gateways exchange scoped messages without a central service
• Giving a partner organization's agent limited access to one topic
• Auditing and revoking trust between gateways

Who it is for: Developers who run agent gateways for different owners and need controlled, revocable communication between them.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Works at the gateway layer rather than inside Hermes, and its description names Hermes among the supported gateways.

Note: The README describes it as an active build with releases landing daily.

FAQ