Hi Thomas,

[Author hat]

First, I think we want to be a little bit careful here about boiling the
ocean. Like, you are asking good questions, but I think there's a broader
question here about whether ACME (server / client) is an active participant
in RATS, or merely a passive transport for it.

How does a CA/RA come to trust a given Verifier / RATS trust anchor? Maybe
it's a public CA and they have a formal Partner Program. Or maybe it's a
corporate CA and they know that they only issue Dell hardware to their
employees. Or maybe it's a CA part of a Cloud backend and they know what
RATS data they're expecting their kubernetes stack to produce. I think this
question is really for the CA to sort out privately, and is out-of-scope
for the ACME wire transport protocol being standardized here.

Freshness -- I think the scope of this draft-acme-rats is simply to provide
a way for the ACME Server to supply the ACME Client with a RATS nonce, and
that anything that smells like Appraisal Policy should be outside the scope
of this draft.

I agree with the point that encrypted Evidence might require a new ACME
Directory entry so that the ACME Client can discover the public key that it
should encrypt the Evidence for, but I think we should be careful here too
about scope creep and try to keep this as a passive transport mechanism (ie
as simple as we can get away with).

On Mon, 8 Dec 2025 at 13:57, Michael Richardson <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
> Thomas Fossati <[email protected]> wrote:
>     > On Mon, 8 Dec 2025 at 09:01, Liuchunchi(Peter) <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>     >> The CA/RA should have some prior trust relationship established with
>     >> the verifier. In the passport model, a CA would have a list of an
>     >> acceptable verifier and corresponding public keys.
>
>     > In an enterprise environment, this should be quite easy to achieve:
>     > 1. The verifier owner is the enterprise itself.
>     > 2. Similarly, the RP owner (i.e. the CA/RA administrator) is also
>     > tightly coupled with the enterprise (in most cases, I would expect
>     > this to be a complete overlap).
>
>     > However, in a more general setting, it looks like the trust
>     > relationship establishment may be more complex to bootstrap, which
> may
>     > require some kind of discovery interface.
>
> It's not clear to me that you can even reasonably do this.
> There is a business relationship first, and not a *LetsEncrypt*
> free-for-all..
> What would you discover?
>
>     > (On a side note: in the background check model where evidence is
>     > encrypted, there also has to be a discovery mechanism, maybe via the
>     > usual ACME directory, for the attester to discover the verifier’s
>     > encryption key.  So, yes, discovery tout-court is a feature that
>     > probably warrants some further exploration.)
>
> We put that into section 4.1, as: "verifierEncryptionCredential"
> It could be that the RP (ACME Server) needs to know more about the client
> before it can pick the right Verifier, and therefore the right key.
> Remember that the client already logged in with an account, and that has
> probably been bound to via externalAccount to the business relationship.
> (Again, this is among the reasons I think background check is much more
> complicated)
>
>     >> Regarding freshness issue, in my case, there would be a EDR client
>     >> software that is responsible for collecting evidences from host
>     >> endpoint attester, but I think this is general problem that could be
>     >> improved. Any suggestions?
>
>     > If the attestation result format (and the verification API) allow it,
>     > requiring the AR to include the same nonce signed by the verifier
>     > could achieve binding.
>
> Yes.  One nonce or two?
> Who picked it? RP or Verifier?
>
>     > It would clearly destroy the cacheability properties of the AR, but
>     > that may actually be a good thing in this case :-)
>
> Yes, it's a good thing.
>
> --
> ]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh
> networks [
> ]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT
> architect   [
> ]     [email protected]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on
> rails    [
>
>
> --
> Michael Richardson <[email protected]>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
>            Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Acme mailing list -- [email protected]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
>
_______________________________________________
Acme mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]

Reply via email to