| Internet-Draft | AEP over RATS | June 2026 |
| Sokolov | Expires 30 December 2026 | [Page] |
This document sketches a composition pattern in which an application-layer "action evidence package" (AEP) -- a signed, append-only record of an action taken by an automated (for example, AI-agent) system, the authority under which it was taken, and its outcome -- is treated as Evidence in the sense of the RATS Architecture (RFC 9334) and bound to platform Evidence produced by a hardware root of trust. The intent is that a single Verifier, or a composition of Verifiers, can appraise both the platform state and the application-layer action together, and emit an Attestation Result that a Relying Party can use to reason about what an automated system did and on what platform it did so without trusting the operator's self-report for either. This is an individual sketch intended to ask the working group whether the pattern is already covered by existing mechanisms or warrants a short document.¶
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Records of automated decision-making are increasingly produced for accountability purposes: an action identifier, an authorising principal, inputs and tool calls, and an outcome, chained so that tampering is detectable. Such an action evidence package (AEP) is useful but has the standard self-report limitation: every field is asserted by the same software stack whose integrity is in question. The signature proves the record was produced by a key the runtime holds; it does not prove what the runtime was.¶
The RATS Architecture [RFC9334] separates the party that produces Evidence (Attester), the party that appraises it (Verifier), and the party that acts on the verdict (Relying Party). Binding an AEP to platform Evidence appraised under RATS supplies the independence the self-report lacks. This document describes the composition and asks whether it is novel enough to specify.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
This document uses RATS terminology as defined in [RFC9334]: the roles Attester, Verifier, Relying Party, Endorser, and Reference Value Provider, and the conceptual messages Evidence, Endorsements, Reference Values, and Attestation Results.¶
An AEP is an application-layer, signed, append-only record. For the purposes of this document its salient properties are: (a) it records an action, an authorising principal, and an outcome; (b) it is chained for tamper-evidence; and (c) it is produced by the same software stack that performs the action. Property (c) is precisely why it benefits from composition with platform Evidence.¶
The composition treats the AEP as application-layer Evidence conveyed alongside platform Evidence:¶
The platform produces hardware-rooted Evidence (for example, a TPM quote over measured-boot registers, or a TEE attestation token), appraised against Reference Values (for example, conveyed as a Concise Reference Integrity Manifest [I-D.ietf-rats-corim]) and Endorsements by a Verifier.¶
The AEP is conveyed as a further Evidence item. Candidate conveyances are an EAT [RFC9711] carrying the AEP (or a digest of it) as a claim or submodule (the EAT submodule / Detached-Submodule-Digest mechanism is the standard nesting facility here), or a CMW collection -- the RATS Conceptual Messages Wrapper [I-D.ietf-rats-msg-wrap] -- that groups the platform Evidence and the AEP into one message.¶
A Verifier -- or, following the layered Platform-Verifier / Workload-Verifier pattern of [I-D.ietf-rats-multi-verifier], a platform Verifier and an application Verifier in composition -- appraises both and emits an Attestation Result.¶
The binding between the two is load-bearing: the AEP, at record time, SHOULD incorporate a reference to a fresh platform appraisal (or to the platform Evidence and the nonce that scoped it), so that a later Relying Party can ask not only "what did the automated system do, and under what authority?" but "and was it done on a platform whose state was independently attested within the same freshness window?". The [RFC9334] Section 10 freshness mechanisms -- nonces, synchronised-clock timestamps, and Epoch IDs/handles -- apply unchanged.¶
For a non-specialist Relying Party, this work resolves an appraisal to a small two-axis vocabulary: an authorisation axis computed from the AEP and policy (Authorised / Unauthorised / Indeterminate) and a platform axis (Attested / Contested / Expired). AR4SI [I-D.ietf-rats-ar4si] defines four trustworthiness tiers -- none, affirming, warning, contraindicated -- serialised in an EAR [I-D.ietf-rats-ear]. Two of the platform terms map directly onto those tiers: an affirming appraisal to Attested; a warning or contraindicated appraisal that runs but contradicts Reference Values to Contested; while the none tier, in which the Verifier asserts nothing, denotes an inconclusive appraisal rather than a pass or fail. Expired is deliberately NOT an AR4SI trustworthiness tier: it captures a separate, token-level condition -- evidence stale relative to the freshness policy, or supporting material that has lapsed -- surfaced by the EAT exp claim and by nonce-based evidence freshness, not by the trustworthiness vocabulary. This correspondence is provisional and SHOULD be validated against a Verifier's actual EAR output; the working group's view on whether such a mapping belongs in a document, or purely in deployment guidance, is solicited.¶
A small emulated feasibility check (software TPM via swtpm, with a minimal Verifier stand-in) folds the hash of an AEP outcome and a fresh nonce into an attestation-key-signed quote, with a model-artefact measurement in a platform register, and resolves the three platform-axis cases and rejects a forged outcome bound to a valid quote. It is emulated and minimal; it demonstrates the binding, not a hardware-rooted guarantee. Details are in [ZENODO-AEP].¶
To validate the result-vocabulary correspondence of the preceding section against a real Attestation Result rather than a stand-in, the composition was exercised end-to-end against a conformant RATS Verifier: an instance of the open-source Project Veraison Verifier, built and run locally. This is an independent exercise of an open-source implementation; it is NOT a conformance claim, an endorsement, or any partnership with the Veraison project.¶
The Attester was an emulated software TPM (swtpm), not a hardware guarantee. A fresh EC P-256 Attestation Key (AK) was created in the swtpm; the AEP outcome digest was measured into a Platform Configuration Register (PCR 4); and a genuine swtpm TPM quote was produced over PCRs 1-4 with the freshness nonce as qualifying data. The quote was packed into the Verifier reference TPM evidence wire format (NODE_ID || SIZE || TPMS_ATTEST || TPMT_SIGNATURE). A Concise Reference Integrity Manifest (CoRIM) was provisioned carrying two items keyed by a single instance identifier: the AK public key as a trust anchor, and the golden PCR composite digest as a Reference Value. The quote was then submitted through one challenge-response session per appraisal, and the Verifier returned a signed EAR.¶
The verdicts below were read from the decoded EARs (the EAR profile was the Verifier own, signed with ES256):¶
Case A was independently re-verified outside the Verifier: the quote PCR digest equals the provisioned golden value, and the signature verifies against the AK public key, which are exactly the two checks the Verifier performs. These results confirm the provisional mapping of the preceding section against a real EAR for the two platform terms an appraisal of this kind can produce. The third platform term, Expired, is a freshness condition; the reference scheme used here does not produce it, which motivates the freshness consideration below. Full artifacts (the reproducible driver script, the decoded EARs, the submitted evidence tokens, and the independent re-verifier) accompany [ZENODO-AEP].¶
Composition does not dissolve trust assumptions; it relocates them. The platform axis depends on the hardware vendor's Endorsements and the Verifier's independence; the AEP axis depends on the integrity of the key the runtime holds, which is exactly what the platform Evidence is meant to ground. Binding an AEP to a platform appraisal is only as fresh as the weaker of the two freshness mechanisms. Attesting a specific model or workload version requires that artefact be measured into the attested state, which is a deployment commitment. A forged AEP outcome presented under an otherwise-valid platform quote MUST be detectable through the output-binding: the outcome digest is covered by the quote's signed data, so an implementation that binds the AEP reference outside the signed data does not achieve this property. The feasibility note (and the appraisal in Section 7) demonstrates this binding in emulation only (a software TPM); on real hardware the guarantee holds to the extent the outcome digest is genuinely inside the signed and quoted data.¶
The end-to-end appraisal above surfaced a freshness observation worth recording for implementers. A challenge-response transport supplies a session nonce, and the EAT freshness mechanisms of RFC 9711 are available; but whether the nonce is actually enforced depends on the Verifier appraisal scheme, not on the transport. In the reference TPM scheme exercised here, the appraisal compared only the quote signature and the PCR digest against the Reference Value; it did not compare the nonce the Attester bound into the quote qualifying data (the ExtraData field of TPMS_ATTEST) against the session expected nonce. As a result, a replayed or stale quote, correctly signed over a matching PCR state, could still be appraised as affirming. Freshness in this deployment was therefore enforced outside the conformant Verifier, in the application own appraisal step.¶
The idiomatic remedy is two small, separable pieces, and applies generally to any scheme whose evidence carries an attester-bound nonce in signed qualifying data: (1) the appraisal scheme surfaces the attester-bound qualifying data (here, TPMS_ATTEST.ExtraData) as an extracted claim, so that an appraisal policy has a value to compare; and (2) an appraisal policy compares that claim against the session expected nonce and returns a contraindicated verdict when they differ. This is offered as a responsible-disclosure observation about a community-maintained reference scheme, not a deployed production trust service.¶
This document has no IANA actions. (If a future revision defines an EAT claim or a CMW type for an AEP, the corresponding registrations would appear here.)¶
Thanks to the Veraison community for the discussion that prompted this sketch.¶