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Interoperability · Flagship case study

ProtoBridge

Governance that survives a protocol boundary.

An interoperability layer that normalises MCP and A2A messages into one governed envelope before dispatch and inspects the result again on return.

Inspect repository

Problem

MCP connects agents to tools while A2A connects agents to other agents. Ad-hoc translation loses identity, sensitivity, and correlation context at exactly the boundary an auditor needs to inspect.

Architectural decision

Every message is lifted into one ProtocolEnvelope. Governance travels inside the message, while codec pairs handle wire-level MCP and A2A transport.

Execution topology

  1. 01

    Inbound protocol

  2. 02

    Normalised envelope

  3. 03

    Policy inspection

  4. 04

    MCP or A2A dispatch

  5. 05

    Egress inspection

Engineered invariants

  • Protocol translation does not discard governance context.
  • Ingress and egress are inspected separately.
  • The audit ledger stores payload digests rather than sensitive payloads.
  • Adding a protocol requires one codec pair, not pairwise translators.

Boundaries stated plainly

  • — Published demonstrations use controlled traces rather than a customer's private traffic.
  • — Policy rules are seams for adoption, not a universal compliance programme.
  • — Cross-company identity and key management remain deployment responsibilities.

Enterprise adoption path

  1. 01Integrate enterprise identity.
  2. 02Map data classifications to policy.
  3. 03Connect production MCP servers and A2A peers.