Remote ATtestation procedureS D. Condrey Internet-Draft WritersLogic Intended status: Standards Track 14 February 2026 Expires: 18 August 2026 Proof of Process (PoP): Architecture, Evidence Format, and VDF draft-condrey-rats-pop-protocol-02 Abstract This document specifies the Proof of Process (PoP) protocol, a specialized profile of Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) designed to validate digital authorship through a "provenance of effort." It defines the core architecture, the RATS role mappings, the normative CBOR-encoded Evidence Format (including EAT integration), and the Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) mechanisms used to prove temporal and physical creation constraints. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on 18 August 2026. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 1] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Core Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. Attester State Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5. Attestation Assurance Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Evidence Format and CDDL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7. VDF and Temporal Proofs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7.1. Memory-Hard Sequential Functions (Argon2id) . . . . . . . 6 7.2. Hardware-Anchored Time (HAT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7.3. Non-deterministic Physical Freshness . . . . . . . . . . 6 8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 9.1. Relay and Diversion Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 9.2. Replay Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. Introduction The rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has created an authenticity crisis in digital discourse. While traditional provenance tracks the "custody of pixels," it fails to attest to the human-driven process of creation. This document specifies the Proof of Process (PoP) protocol, which extends the RATS architecture [RFC9334] to validate the "provenance of effort." Unlike traditional attestation which captures static system state, PoP attests to a continuous physical process. It introduces *Proof of Biological Space-Time (PoBST)* to enforce temporal monotonicity and *Cross-Domain Constraint Entanglement (CDCE)* to bind behavioral entropy (human jitter) and physical state (thermodynamics) to the document's evolution. Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 2] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 2. Terminology Attester: The combination of an Attesting Environment (AE) and Target Environment (TE) responsible for generating PoP Evidence. Checkpoint: A cryptographic commitment to a block of events and the document state, bound by a VDF. PoBST: Proof of Biological Space-Time. A memory-hard sequential function with asymmetric verification, entangled with human jitter. CDCE: Cross-Domain Constraint Entanglement. The method of weaving jitter and thermodynamics into the cryptographic chain. 3. Core Principles PoP operates on five primary constraints: * *Physics-based Cost:* Memory-Hard Sequential Functions (MHSF) establish an economic lower bound on forgery. * *Physical Freshness:* Replay and simulation attacks are defeated by anchoring sessions to non-deterministic physical markers (thermal noise). * *Biological Binding:* Captured human motor-signal randomness (jitter) serves as the non-deterministic seed for the spacetime proof. * *Out-of-Band Presence:* Utilizing secondary physical devices (e.g., smartphone QR scans) to bridge the digital-physical gap. * *Asymmetric Verification:* PoBST allows complex 10-hour proofs to be verified in milliseconds. 4. Attester State Machine The AE MUST implement the following formal state machine: * *RECORDING:* AE captures semantic events and physical telemetry into a hash-linked buffer. * *PENDING_CHECK:* The current event block is frozen to prepare for a checkpoint. * *CHECKPOINT:* AE computes the VDF over the block hash and incorporates the entangled seed. Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 3] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 * *SEALING:* The Attester generates a final snapshot, signs the transcript root with a hardware Secure Element, and prepares the transport container. 5. Attestation Assurance Levels Attestation Assurance Levels (T1-T4) define the strength of hardware binding, mapping to NIST SP 800-63B Authenticator Assurance Levels (AAL) and EAT security levels [RFC9711]. T1: Software-Only Baseline evidence generation without hardware anchors. Equivalent to AAL1. T2: Attested Software AE attempts to use platform security APIs (e.g., keychain integration) but degrades gracefully. AAL1-2 equivalent. T3: Hardware-Bound Requires TPM 2.0 or platform Secure Enclave key binding. Evidence generation MUST fail if hardware is unavailable. AAL3 equivalent. T4: Hardware-Hardened Maximum assurance with discrete TPM, PUF binding, and enclave execution for timing-sensitive operations. AAL3+ equivalent. 6. Evidence Format and CDDL Evidence Packets are CBOR-encoded and identified by semantic tag *1347571280*. Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 4] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 evidence-packet = { 1 => uint, ; version 2 => tstr, ; profile-uri 3 => uuid, ; packet-id 4 => pop-timestamp, ; created 5 => document-ref, ; document 6 => [+ checkpoint], ; checkpoints ? 7 => attestation-tier, ; T1-T4 assurance level ? 10 => [+ presence-challenge], ; QR/OOB proofs ? 18 => physical-liveness-section, ; CDCE markers } checkpoint = { 1 => uint, ; sequence (strictly monotonic) 2 => uuid, ; checkpoint-id 3 => pop-timestamp, ; timestamp (local) 4 => hash-value, ; content-hash 5 => uint, ; char-count 6 => edit-delta, ; delta 7 => hash-value, ; prev-hash 8 => hash-value, ; checkpoint-hash 9 => process-proof, ; VDF (PoBST) 10 => jitter-binding, ; behavioral-entropy 11 => physical-state, ; CDCE Weave 12 => bstr .size 32, ; entangled-mac (HMAC-SHA256) } document-ref = { 1 => hash-value, ; content-hash 3 => uint, ; byte-length 4 => uint, ; char-count ? 5 => hash-salt-mode, ; 0=unsalted, 1=author-salted ? 6 => bstr, ; salt-commitment } edit-delta = { 1 => int, ; chars-added 2 => int, ; chars-deleted 3 => uint, ; edit-operations-count } physical-state = { 1 => [+ float16], ; thermal-trajectory-delta 2 => uint, ; entropy-pool-delta } 7. VDF and Temporal Proofs Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 5] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 7.1. Memory-Hard Sequential Functions (Argon2id) Implementations MUST support *Argon2id* [RFC9106] as the MTI memory- hard function. Default parameters: Time Cost (t)=1, Memory Cost (m)=2^16 (64 MiB), Parallelism (p)=1. 7.2. Hardware-Anchored Time (HAT) In T3/T4 tiers, the VDF seed MUST be bound to the *TPM Monotonic Counter*. hat-seed = H(tpm-monotonic-counter || physical-freshness || document-hash) 7.3. Non-deterministic Physical Freshness The VDF seed MUST incorporate *Non-deterministic Physical Freshness* derived from physical events (e.g., thermal noise) sampled within the AE at the start of the session to prevent replay attacks. 8. IANA Considerations This document requests registration of CBOR tags 1347571280 ("PPP ") and 1463894560 ("WAR "), and the EAT profile urn:ietf:params:rats:eat:profile:pop:1.0 in their respective registries. 9. Security Considerations 9.1. Relay and Diversion Attacks Evidence packets are self-contained and bound to document content, making them independently verifiable. No session binding is required between Attester and Verifier, eliminating connection-based vulnerabilities. 9.2. Replay Attacks Defeated through Physical Freshness. Replaying a session requires replaying the immutable hardware physics of the AE at the exact microsecond of the original capture. 10. References 10.1. Normative References Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 6] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . [RFC8610] Birkholz, H., Vigano, C., and C. Bormann, "Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and JSON Data Structures", RFC 8610, DOI 10.17487/RFC8610, June 2019, . [RFC8949] Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)", STD 94, RFC 8949, DOI 10.17487/RFC8949, December 2020, . [RFC9106] Biryukov, A., Dinu, D., Khovratovich, D., and S. Josefsson, "Argon2 Memory-Hard Function for Password Hashing and Proof-of-Work Applications", RFC 9106, DOI 10.17487/RFC9106, September 2021, . [RFC9334] Birkholz, H., Thaler, D., Richardson, M., Smith, N., and W. Pan, "Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) Architecture", RFC 9334, DOI 10.17487/RFC9334, January 2023, . [RFC9711] Lundblade, L., Mandyam, G., O'Donoghue, J., and C. Wallace, "The Entity Attestation Token (EAT)", RFC 9711, DOI 10.17487/RFC9711, April 2025, . 10.2. Informative References [Pietrzak2019] Pietrzak, K., "Simple Verifiable Delay Functions", 2019, . [PoP-Appraisal] Condrey, D., "Proof of Process (PoP): Forensic Appraisal and Security Model", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-condrey-rats-pop-appraisal-01, 2026, . Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 7] Internet-Draft PoP Protocol February 2026 Author's Address David Condrey WritersLogic Inc San Diego, California, United States Email: david@writerslogic.com Condrey Expires 18 August 2026 [Page 8]