Internet-Draft SCITT Architecture October 2023
Birkholz, et al. Expires 25 April 2024 [Page]
Workgroup:
SCITT
Internet-Draft:
draft-ietf-scitt-architecture-04
Published:
Intended Status:
Standards Track
Expires:
Authors:
H. Birkholz
Fraunhofer SIT
A. Delignat-Lavaud
Microsoft Research
C. Fournet
Microsoft Research
Y. Deshpande
ARM
S. Lasker
RKVST

An Architecture for Trustworthy and Transparent Digital Supply Chains

Abstract

Traceability of physical and digital Artifacts in supply chains is a long-standing, but increasingly serious security concern. The rise in popularity of verifiable data structures as a mechanism to make actors more accountable for breaching their compliance promises has found some successful applications to specific use cases (such as the supply chain for digital certificates), but lacks a generic and scalable architecture that can address a wider range of use cases.

This document defines a generic, interoperable and scalable architecture to enable transparency across any supply chain with minimum adoption barriers. It provides flexibility, enabling interoperability across different implementations of Transparency Services with various auditing and compliance requirements. Issuers can register their Signed Statements on any Transparency Service, with the guarantee that all Consumers will be able to verify them.

Within the SCITT Architecture, a producer is known as an Issuer, and a consumer is known as a Verifier.

About This Document

This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-scitt-architecture/.

Discussion of this document takes place on the scitt Working Group mailing list (mailto:scitt@ietf.org), which is archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/scitt/. Subscribe at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/scitt/.

Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/ietf-wg-scitt/draft-ietf-scitt-architecture.

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 25 April 2024.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This document describes a scalable and flexible, decentralized architecture to enhance auditability and accountability across various existing and emerging supply chains. It achieves this goal by enforcing the following complementary security guarantees:

  1. Statements made by Issuers about supply chain Artifacts must be identifiable, authentic, and non-repudiable

  2. Such Statements must be registered on a secure Append-only Log, enabling provenance and history to be independently and consistently audited

  3. Issuers can efficiently prove to any other party the Registration of their Signed Statements; verifying this proof ensures that the Issuer is consistent and non-equivocal when producing Signed Statements

The first guarantee is achieved by requiring Issuers to sign their Statements and associated metadata using a distributed public key infrastructure. The second guarantee is achieved by storing the Signed Statement on an immutable, Append-only Log. The next guarantee is achieved by implementing the Append-only Log using a verifiable data structure (such as a Merkle Tree [MERKLE]). Lastly, the Transparency Service verifies the identity of the Issuer, and conformance to a Registration Policy associated with the instance of the Transparency Service. As the Issuer of the Signed Statement and conformance to the Registration Policy are confirmed, an endorsement is made as the Signed Statement is added to the Append-only Log.

The guarantees and techniques used in this document generalize those of Certificate Transparency [RFC9162], which can be re-interpreted as an instance of this architecture for the supply chain of X.509 certificates. However, the range of use cases and applications in this document is broader, which requires more flexibility in how each Transparency Service is implemented and operates.

Each service MAY enforce its own Registration Policies for authorizing entities to register their Signed Statements to the Append-only Log. Some Transparency Services may also enforce authorization policies limiting who can write, read and audit the Append-only Log. It is critical to provide interoperability for all Transparency Services instances as the composition of supply chain entities is ever-changing. It is implausible to expect all participants to choose a single vendor or Append-only Log.

A Transparency Service provides visibility into Signed Statements associated with various supply chains and their sub-systems. The Signed Statements (and inner payload) make claims about the Artifacts produced by a supply chain. A Transparency Service endorses specific and well-defined metadata about Artifacts which are captured in the envelope of the Statements. Some metadata is selected (and signed) by the Issuer ("who issued the Statement", "what type of Artifact is described", "what is the Artifact's version"). Whereas additional metadata is selected (and countersigned) by the Transparency Services ("when was the Signed Statement about an Artifact registered in the Transparency Service", "which registration policy was used"). Evaluating and Registering a Signed Statement, adding it to the Append-only Log, and producing a Transparent Statement is considered a form of counter-signed notarization.

A Statements payload content is always opaque and MAY be encrypted when submitted to the Transparency Services. However the header metadata MUST be transparent in order to warrant trust for later processing.

Transparent Statements provide a common basis for holding Issuers accountable for the Statement payload about Artifacts they release. Multiple Issuers may Register additional Signed Statements about the same Artifact, but they cannot delete or alter Signed Statements previously added to the Append-only Log. The ability for the original Issuer to make additional Statements about an Artifact provides for updated information to be shared, such as new positive or negative validations of quality. The ability of other Issuers to make Statements about an Artifact, produced from another Issuer, provides for third party validations. A Transparency Service may restrict access to Signed Statements through access control or Registration policies. However, third parties (such as Auditors) would be granted access as needed to attest to the validity of the Artifact, Subject or the entirety of the Transparency Service. Independent third parties may also make Statements about an Artifact, published on other Transparency Services.

Trust in the Transparency Service itself is supported both by protecting their implementation (using replication, trusted hardware, and remote attestation of a system's operational state) and by enabling independent audits of the correctness and consistency of its Append-only Log, thereby holding the organization that operates it accountable. Unlike CT, where independent Auditors are responsible for enforcing the consistency of multiple independent instances of the same global Transparency Service, each Transparency Service is required to guarantee the consistency of its own Append-only Log (through the use of a consensus algorithm between replicas of the Transparency Service), but assume no consistency between different Transparency Services.

Breadth of verifier access is critical. As a result, the Transparency Service specified in this architecture caters to two types of audiences:

  1. Issuers: organizations, stakeholders, and users involved in creating or attesting to supply chain artifacts, releasing authentic Statements to a definable set of peers

  2. Verifiers: organizations, stakeholders, consumers, and users involved in validating supply chain artifacts, but can only do so if the Statements are known to be authentic. Verifiers MAY be Issuers, providing additional Signed Statements, attesting to conformance of various compliance requirements.

The Issuer of a Signed Statement must be authenticated and authorized according to the Registration Policy of the Transparency Service. Analogously, Transparent Statement Verifiers rely on verifiable trustworthiness assertions associated with Transparent Statements and their processing provenance in a believable manner. If trust can be put into the operations that record Signed Statements in a secure, Append-only Log via online operations, the same trust can be put into the resulting Transparent Statement, issued by the Transparency Services and that can be validated in offline operations.

The Transparency Services specified in this architecture are language independent and can be implemented alongside or within existing services.

The interoperability guaranteed by the Transparency Services is enabled via core components (architectural constituents). Many of the data elements processed by the core components are based on the CBOR Signing and Encryption (COSE) standard specified in [RFC9052], which is used to produce Signed Statements about Artifacts and to build and maintain a Merkle tree that functions as an Append-only Log for corresponding Signed Statements.

1.1. Requirements Notation

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.

2. Use Cases

The building blocks defined in SCITT are intended to support applications in any supply chain that produces or relies upon digital artifacts, from the build and supply of software and IoT devices to advanced manufacturing and food supply.

Detailed use cases are maintained in a separate document [I-D.ietf-scitt-software-use-cases].

3. Terminology

The terms defined in this section have special meaning in the context of Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency, and Trust, which are used throughout this document. When used in text, the corresponding terms are capitalized. To ensure readability, only a core set of terms is included in this section.

Append-only Log (converges Ledger and Registry):

the verifiable append-only data structure that stores Signed Statements in a Transparency Service often referred to by the synonym, Registry, Log or Ledger. SCITT supports multiple Log and Receipt formats to accommodate different Transparency Service implementations, such as historical Merkle Trees and sparse Merkle Trees.

Artifact:

a physical or non-physical item that is moving along a supply chain.

Auditor:

an entity that checks the correctness and consistency of all Transparent Statements issued by a Transparency Service.

Envelope:

metadata, created by the Issuer to produce a Signed Statement. The Envelope contains the identity of the Issuer and information about the Artifact, enabling Transparency Service Registration Policies to validate the Signed Statement. A Signed Statement is a COSE Envelope wrapped around a Statement, binding the metadata in the Envelope to the Statement. In COSE, an Envelope consists of a protected header (included in the Issuer's signature) and an unprotected header (not included in the Issuer's signature).

Feed:

see Subject

Issuer:

organizations, stakeholders, and users involved in creating or attesting to supply chain artifacts, releasing authentic Statements to a definable set of peers. An Issuer may be the owner or author of Artifacts, or an independent third party such as an auditor, reviewer or an endorser.

Receipt:

a Receipt is a cryptographic proof that a Signed Statement is recorded in the Append-only Log. Receipts are based on COSE Signed Merkle Tree Proofs [I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs]. Receipts consist of Transparency Service-specific inclusion proofs, a signature by the Transparency Service of the state of the Append-only Log, and additional metadata (contained in the signature's protected headers) to assist in auditing.

Registration:

the process of submitting a Signed Statement to a Transparency Service, applying the Transparency Service's Registration Policy, adding to the Append-only Log, and producing a Receipt.

Registration Policy:

the pre-condition enforced by the Transparency Service before registering a Signed Statement, based on information in the non-opaque header and metadata contained in its COSE Envelope. A Transparency Service MAY implement any range of policies that meets their needs. However a Transparency Service can not alter the contents of the Signed Statements.

Registry:

See Append-only Log

Signed Statement:

an identifiable and non-repudiable Statement about an Artifact signed by an Issuer. In SCITT, Signed Statements are encoded as COSE signed objects; the payload of the COSE structure contains the issued Statement.

Statement:

any serializable information about an Artifact. To help interpretation of Statements, they must be tagged with a media type (as specified in [RFC6838]). A Statement may represent a Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM) that lists the ingredients of a software Artifact, an endorsement or attestation about an Artifact, indicate the End of Life (EOL), redirection to a newer version, or any content an Issuer wishes to publish about an Artifact. The additional Statements about an artifact are correlated by the Subject defined in the CWT_Claims protected header. The Statement is considered opaque to Transparency Service, and MAY be encrypted.

Subject:

(Previously named Feed) a logical collection of Statements about the same Artifact. For any step or set of steps in a supply chain there may be multiple statements made about the same Artifact. Issuers use Subject to create a coherent sequence of Signed Statements about the same Artifact and Verifiers use the Subject to ensure completeness and non-equivocation in supply chain evidence by identifying all Transparent Statements linked to the one(s) they are evaluating. In SCITT, Subject is a property of the dedicated, protected header attribute 13: CWT_Claims within the protected header of the COSE envelope.

Transparency Service:

an entity that maintains and extends the Append-only Log, and endorses its state. A Transparency Service MAY implement a Registration Policy, often referred to by its synonym Notary. A Transparency Service can be a complex distributed system, and SCITT requires the Transparency Service to provide many security guarantees about its Append-only Log. The identity of a Transparency Service is captured by a public key that must be known by Verifiers in order to validate Receipts.

Transparent Statement:

a Signed Statement that is augmented with a Receipt created via Registration in a Transparency Service. The receipt is stored in the unprotected header of COSE Envelope of the Signed Statement. A Transparent Statement remains a valid Signed Statement, and may be registered again in a different Transparency Service.

Verifier:

organizations, stakeholders, and users involved in validating supply chain Artifacts. Verifiers consume Transparent Statements, verifying their proofs and inspecting the Statement payload, either before using corresponding Artifacts, or later to audit an Artifact's provenance on the supply chain.

4. Definition of Transparency

In this document, the definition of transparency is intended to build over abstract notions of Append-only Logs and Receipts. Existing transparency systems such as Certificate Transparency are instances of this definition.

A Signed Statement is an identifiable and non-repudiable Statement made by an Issuer. The Issuer selects additional metadata and attaches a proof of endorsement (in most cases, a signature) using the identity key of the Issuer that binds the Statement and its metadata. Signed Statements can be made transparent by attaching a proof of Registration by a Transparency Service, in the form of a Receipt that countersigns the Signed Statement and witnesses its inclusion in the Append-only Log of a Transparency Service. By extension, the document may say an Artifact (a firmware binary) is transparent if it comes with one or more Transparent Statements from its author or owner, though the context should make it clear what type of Signed Statements is expected for a given Artifact.

Transparency does not prevent dishonest or compromised Issuers, but it holds them accountable. Any Artifact that may be verified, is subject to scrutiny and auditing by other parties. The Transparency Service provides a history of Statements, which may be made by multiple Issuers, enabling Verifiers to make informed decisions.

Transparency is implemented by providing a consistent, append-only, cryptographically verifiable, publicly available record of entries. A SCITT instance is referred to as a Transparency Service. Implementations of Transparency Services may protect their Append-only Log using a combination of trusted hardware, replication and consensus protocols, and cryptographic evidence. A Receipt is an offline, universally-verifiable proof that an entry is recorded in the Append-only Log. Receipts do not expire, but it is possible to append new entries (more recent Signed Statements) that subsume older entries (less recent Signed Statements).

Anyone with access to the Transparency Service can independently verify its consistency and review the complete list of Transparent Statements registered by each Issuer. However, the Registrations of separate Transparency Services are generally disjoint, though it is possible to take a Transparent Statement from one Transparency Service and register it again on another (if its policy allows), so the authorization of the Issuer and of the Transparency Service by the Verifier of the Receipt are generally independent.

Reputable Issuers are thus incentivized to carefully review their Statements before signing them to produce Signed Statements. Similarly, reputable Transparency Services are incentivized to secure their Append-only Log, as any inconsistency can easily be pinpointed by any Auditor with read access to the Transparency Service. Some Append-only Log formats may also support consistency auditing (Section 5.2.3.2) through Receipts, that is, given two valid Receipts the Transparency Service may be asked to produce a cryptographic proof that they are consistent. Failure to produce this proof can indicate that the Transparency Services operator misbehaved.

5. Architecture Overview

Artifact Decentralized Identifier Issuer Statement Envelope DID Key Manifest Signed COSE Signing Statement Transparency Transparency Receipt Service Service Transparent Statement Verifier Verify Transparent Statement Auditor Collect Receipts Replay Log

The SCITT architecture consists of a very loose federation of Transparency Services, and a set of common formats and protocols for issuing and registering Signed Statements, and auditing Transparent Statements.

In order to accommodate as many Transparency Service implementations as possible, this document only specifies the format of Signed Statements (which must be used by all Issuers) and a very thin wrapper format for Receipts, which specifies the Transparency Service identity and the agility parameters for the Merkle Tree Proof. Most of the details of the Receipt's contents are specified in the COSE Signed Merkle Tree Proof document [I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs].

This section describes at a high level, the three main roles and associated processes in SCITT: Issuers and the Signed Statement issuance process, Transparency Service and the Signed Statement Registration process, as well as Verifiers of the Transparent Statements and the Receipt validation process.

5.1. Signed Statement Issuance and Registration

5.1.1. Issuer Identity

Before an Issuer is able to produce Signed Statements, it must first create its decentralized identifier [DID-CORE] (also known as a DID). A DID can be resolved into a key manifest (a list of public keys indexed by a key identifier) using many different DID methods.

Issuers MAY choose the DID method they prefer, but with no guarantee that all Transparency Services will register their Signed Statements, as each Transparency Service may implement different Registration Policies. To facilitate interoperability, all Transparency Service implementations MUST support the did:web method [DID-WEB]. For example, if the Issuer publishes its manifest at https://sample.issuer/user/alice/did.json, the DID of the Issuer is did:web:sample.issuer:user:alice.

Issuers SHOULD use consistent decentralized identifiers for all their Statements about Artifacts, to simplify authorization by Verifiers and auditing. If an Issuer uses multiple DIDs (for instance, their clients support different resolution methods), they MUST ensure that statements signed under each DID are consistent.

Issuers MAY update their DID Document at any time, for instance to refresh their signing keys or algorithms. Issuers SHOULD NOT remove or change any of their previous keys unless they intend to revoke all Signed Statements that are registered as Transparent Statements issued with those keys.

The Issuer's DID is required and appears in the 1 iss claim of the 13 CWT_Claims protected header of the Signed Statements' Envelope. The version of the key from the DID Document used to sign the Signed Statement is written in the 4 kid protected header.

CWT_Claims = {
  1 => tstr; iss, the issuer making statements,
  2 => tstr; sub, the subject of the statements,
  * tstr => any
}

Protected_Header = {
  1   => int             ; algorithm identifier,
  4   => bstr            ; Key ID (kid),
  13  => CWT_Claims      ; CBOR Web Token Claims,
  393 => Reg_Info        ; Registration Policy info,
  3   => tstr            ; payload type
}

4 kid MUST either be an absolute URL, or a relative URL. Relative URL MUST be relative to an iss value.

Resolving kid MUST return an identity document of a registered content type (a set of public keys). In the case of kid being an absolute DID URL, the identity document is called a DID Document, and is expected ot have content type application/did+json.

To dereference a DID URL, it first MUST be resolved. After that the fragment is processed according to the media type.

For example, when resolving did:example:123#key-42, first, the identity document for did:example:123 is resolved as content type application/did+json, next, the fragment #key-42 is dereferenced to a verification method that contains a publicKeyJwk property.

The content type of publicKeyJwk is expected to be application/jwk+json.

The details of both DID resolution and DID dereferencing are out of scope for this document.

The iss or kid, might not be DID URLs, however the following interfaces MUST be satisfied in order to ensure Issuer identity documents, and associated keys are discoverable in a consistent manner.

5.1.1.1. Resolving Identity Documents

The value of id might be found the iss or sub claims if they are present in the protected header or payload.

resolve = (id: string, accept: \
  content_type = 'application/did+json') =>
  idDocument (of content type application/did+json)

For example:

did:example:123

Might resolve to:

{
  "id": "did:example:123",
  "verificationMethod": [{
    "id": "#key-42",
    "type": "JsonWebkey",
    "controller": "did:example:123",
    "publicKeyJwk": {
      "kty": "EC",
      "crv": "P-384",
      "alg": "ES384",
      "x": "LCeAt2sW36j94wuFP0gN...Ler3cKFBCaAHY1svmbPV69bP3RH",
      "y": "zz2SkcOGYM6PbYlw19tc...rd8QWykAprstPdxx4U0uScvDcYd"
    }
  }]
}

Editor note: we might wish to eliminate this intermediate identity document content type, by treating it as an alterative encoding of application/jwk-set+json or application/cose-key-set.

However, there is no media type fragment processing directive that would enable dereferencing the known key set content types, listed above.

5.1.1.1.1. Comment on OIDC

For well known token types, such as id_token or access_token.

iss MUST be a URL, and it MUST have keys discoverable in the following way:

iss can be used to build a .well-known URL to discovery the Issuer's configuration.

For example, iss contoso.example will have the following open id connect configuration URL.

https://contoso.example/.well-known/openid-configuration.

This URL will resolve to a JSON document which contains the property:

jwks_uri, for example https://contoso.example/.well-known/jwks.json

This URL will resolve to a JSON document of content type application/jwk-set+json, which will contain specific keys... for example:

{
  "keys": [
    {
      "alg": "RS256",
      "kty": "RSA",
      "use": "sig",
      "n": "wW9TkSbcn5FV3iUJ-812sqTvwT...YzXrnMZ7WgbMPXmHU8i4z04zw",
      "e": "AQAB",
      "kid": "NTBGNTJEMDc3RUE3RUVEOTM4NDcEFDNzEyOTY5NDNGOUQ4OEU5OA",
      "x5t": "NTBGNTJEMDc3RUE3RUVEOTM4NDcEFDNzEyOTY5NDNGOUQ4OEU5OA",
      "x5c": [
        "MIIDCzCCAfOgAwIBAgIPng0XRWwsd...f5GOGwJS+u/nSYvqCFt57+g3R+"
      ]
    },
    {
      "alg": "RS256",
      "kty": "RSA",
      "use": "sig",
      "n": "ylgVZbNR4nlsU_AbU8Zd7ZhVfm...fo5BLa3_YLWazqcpWRXn9QEDWw",
      "e": "AQAB",
      "kid": "aMIKy_brQk3nLd0PKd9ln",
      "x5t": "-xcTyx47q3ddycG7LtE6QCcETbs",
      "x5c": [
        "MIIC/TCCAeWgAwIBAgIJH62ygzAPG...xCxmHAbK+KdTka/Yg2MadFZdA=="
      ]
    }
  ]
}

TODO: For SCITT to be interoperable with OIDC, it would define key dereferencing compatible with OIDC dereferencing.

5.1.1.2. Dereferencing Public Keys

kid is always present in the protected header.

If iss is also present, kid MUST be a relative URL to iss, otherwise kid MUST be an absolute URL that starts with iss.

id = kid if iss is undefined, or iss + # + kid when iss is defined.

See also draft-ietf-cose-cwt-claims-in-headers.

dereference = (id: string, accept: \
  content_type = 'application/jwk+json') =>
  publicKeyJwk (of content type application/jwk+json)

For example, when DIDs are used:

did:example:123#key-42

Might dereference to:

{
  "kty": "EC",
  "crv": "P-384",
  "alg": "ES384",
  "x": "LCeAt2sW36j94wuFP0gNEIHDzqR6Nh...er3cKFBCaAHY1svmbPV69bP3RH",
  "y": "zz2SkcOGYM6PbYlw19tcbpzo6bEMYH...d8QWykAprstPdxx4U0uScvDcYd"
}

5.1.2. Support for Multiple Artifacts

Issuers may produce Signed Statements about different Artifacts under the same Identity. Issuers and Verifiers must be able to recognize the Artifact to which the statements pertain by looking at the Signed Statement. The iss and sub claims, within the CWT_Claims protected header, are used to identify the Artifact the statement pertains to.

See Subject under Section 3 Terminology.

Issuers MAY use different signing keys (identified by kid in the resolved key manifest) for different Artifacts, or sign all Signed Statements under the same key.

5.1.3. Registration Policy Metadata

SCITT payloads are opaque to Transparency Services. For interoperability, Registration Policy decisions should be based on interpretation of information in the non-opaque Envelope.

The small mandatory set of metadata in the envelope of a Signed Statement is neither intended nor sufficient to express the information required for the processing of Registration Policies in a Transparency Service.

For example, a Transparency Service may only allow a Signed Statement to be registered if it was signed very recently, or may reject a Signed Statement if it arrives out of order in some sequenced protocol.

Any metadata meant to be interpreted by the Transparency Service during Registration Policy evaluation, SHOULD be added to the reg_info header, unless the data is private, in which case it MAY be sent to the Transparency Service as an additional input during registration.

While the Reg_Info header MUST be present in all Signed Statements, all attributes are optional, and the map MAY be empty.

5.2. Transparency Service

The role of Transparency Service can be decomposed into several major functions. The most important is maintaining an Append-only Log, the verifiable data structure that records Signed Statements, and enforcing a Registration Policy. It also maintains a service key, which is used to endorse the state of the Append-only Log in Receipts. All Transparency Services MUST expose standard endpoints for Registration of Signed Statements and Receipt issuance, which is described in Section 8.1. Each Transparency Service also defines its own Registration Policies, which MUST apply to all entries in the Append-only Log.

The combination of Identity, Registration Policy evaluation, and the Transparency Service endpoint constitute the trusted part of the Transparency Service. Each of these components MUST be carefully protected against both external attacks and internal misbehavior by some or all of the operators of the Transparency Service. For instance, the code for the Registration Policy evaluation and endorsement may be protected by running in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The Transparency Service may be replicated with a consensus algorithm, such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT [PBFT]) and may be used to protect against malicious or vulnerable replicas. Threshold signatures may be use to protect the service key, etc.

Beyond the trusted components, Transparency Services may operate additional endpoints for auditing, for instance to query the history of Signed Statements registered by a given Issuer via a certain Subject. Implementations of Transparency Services SHOULD avoid using the service identity and extending the Transparency Service in auditing endpoints, except if it is necessary to compute an Append-only Log consistency proofs. Other evidence to support the correctness and completeness of the audit response MUST be computed from the Append-only Log.

5.2.1. Service Identity, Remote Attestation, and Keying

Every Transparency Service MUST have a public service identity, associated with public/private key pairs for signing on behalf of the service. In particular, this identity must be known by Verifiers when validating a Receipt.

This identity MUST be stable for the lifetime of the service, so that all Receipts remain valid and consistent. The Transparency Service operator MAY use a distributed identifier as their public service identity if they wish to rotate their keys, if the Append-only Log algorithm they use for their Receipt supports it. Other types of cryptographic identities, such as parameters for non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems, may also be used in the future.

A Transparency Service MAY provide extra evidence that it is securely implemented and operated, enabling remote authentication of the hardware platforms and/or software TCB that run the Transparency Service. If present, this additional evidence MUST be recorded in the Append-only Log and presented on demand to Verifiers and Auditors. Examples for Statements that can improve trustworthy assessments of Transparency Services are RATS Conceptual Messages, such as Evidence, Endorsements, or corresponding Attestation Results (see [RFC9334]).

For example, consider a Transparency Service implemented using a set of replicas, each running within its own hardware-protected trusted execution environments (TEEs). Each replica MAY provide a recent attestation report for its TEE, binding their hardware platform to the software that runs the Transparency Service, the long-term public key of the service, and the key used by the replica for signing Receipts. This attestation evidence can be supplemented with Receipts for the software and configuration of the service, as measured in its attestation report.

5.2.2. Registration Policies

Authorization is needed prior to registration of Signed Statements to ensure completeness of an audit. A Transparency Service that registers valid Signed Statement offered by anonymous Issuers would provide limited to no value to Verifiers. More advanced use case will rely on the Transparency Service performing additional domain-specific checks before a Signed Statement is accepted. For example, some Transparency Services may validate the non-opaque content (payload) of Signed Statements.

Registration Policies refers to the checks that are performed before a Signed Statement is registered given a set of input values. This specification leaves the implementation of the Registration Policy to the provider of the Transparency Services and its users.

As a minimum, a Transparency Service MUST authenticate the Issuer of the Signed Statement, which requires some form of trust anchor. As defined in [RFC6024], "A trust anchor represents an authoritative entity via a public key and associated data. The public key is used to verify digital signatures, and the associated data is used to constrain the types of information for which the trust anchor is authoritative." The Trust Anchor may be a certificate, a raw public key or other structure, as appropriate. It can be a non-root certificate when it is a certificate.

A provider of a Transparency Service is, however, expected to indicate what Registration Policy is used in a given deployment and inform its users about changes to the Registration Policy.

5.2.3. Append-only Log Security Requirements

There are many different candidate verifiable data structures that may be used to implement an Append-only Log, such as chronological Merkle Trees, sparse/indexed Merkle Trees, full blockchains, and many other variants. The Transparency Service is only required to support concise Receipts (i.e., whose size grows at most logarithmically in the number of entries in the Append-only Log) that can be encoded as a COSE Signed Merkle Tree Proof.

It is possible to offer multiple signature algorithms for the COSE signature of receipts' Signed Merkle Tree, or to change the signing algorithm at later points. However, the Merkle Tree algorithm (including its internal hash function) cannot easily be changed without breaking the consistency of the Append-only Log. It is possible to maintain separate Registries for each algorithm in parallel but the Transparency Service is then responsible for proving their mutual consistency.

5.2.3.1. Finality

A Transparency Service is append-only. Once a Signed Statement is registered and becomes a Transparent Statement, it cannot be modified, deleted, or reordered within the Append-only Log. In particular, once a Receipt is returned for a given Signed Statement, the registered Signed Statement and any preceding entry in the Append-only Log becomes immutable, and the Receipt provides universally-verifiable evidence of this property.

5.2.3.2. Consistency

There is no fork in the Append-only Log. Everyone with access to its contents sees the same sequence of entries, and can check its consistency with any Receipts they have collected. Transparency Service implementations MAY provide a mechanism to verify that the state of the Append-only Log, encoded in an old Receipt, is consistent with the current Append-only Log state.

5.2.3.3. Replayability and Auditing

Everyone with access to the Transparency Service can check the correctness of its contents. In particular:

  • the Transparency Service defines and enforces deterministic Registration Policies that can be re-evaluated based solely on the contents of the Append-only Log at the time of Registration, and must then yield the same result

  • the ordering of entries, their cryptographic contents, and the Transparency Services' governance may be non-deterministic, but they must be verifiable

  • a Transparency Service MAY store evidence about the resolution of DIDs into DID Documents

  • a Transparency Service MAY additionally support verifiability of client authentication and access control

5.2.3.4. Governance and Bootstrapping

Transparency Services MAY document their governance rules and procedures for operating the Transparency Service and updating its code.
Example: relying on Transparent Statements about code updates, secured on its own Append-only Log, or on some auxiliary Transparency Service.

Governance procedures, their auditing, and their transparency are implementation specific.

  • Governance may be based on a consortium of members that are jointly responsible for the Transparency Services, or automated based on the contents of an auxiliary governance Transparency Service.

  • Governance typically involves additional records in the Append-only Log to enable its auditing. The Transparency Service may contain both Transparent Statements and governance entries.

  • Issuers, Verifiers, and third-party Auditors may review the Transparency Service governance before trusting the service, or on a regular basis.

5.3. Verifying Transparent Statements

For a given Transparent Statement, Verifiers take as trusted inputs:

  1. the CWT_Claims Issuer (or its resolved key manifest)

  2. the collection of Transparent Statements to which this Statement about the Artifact belongs (CWT_Claims Subject)

  3. the list of service identities of trusted Transparency Services

When presented with a Transparent Statement for an Artifact, Verifiers verify the CWT_Claims Issuer identity, signature, and Receipt. They may additionally apply a validation policy based on the protected headers present both in the Envelope, the Receipt, or the Statement itself, which may include security-critical or Artifact-specific details.

Some Verifiers may systematically fetch all Transparent Statements using the CWT_Claims Subject and assess them alongside the Transparent Statement they are verifying to ensure freshness, completeness of evidence, and the promise of non-equivocation.

Some Verifiers may choose to subset the collection of Statements, filtering on the payload type (Protected Header 3), the CWT (Protected Header 13) Issuer claim, or other non-opaque properties.

Some Verifiers may systematically resolve Issuer DIDs to fetch the latest corresponding DID documents. This behavior strictly enforces the revocation of compromised keys. Once the Issuer has updated its Statement to remove a key identifier, all Signed Statements include the corresponding kid will be rejected. However, others may delegate DID resolution to a trusted third party and/or cache its results.

Some Verifiers may decide to skip the DID-based signature verification, relying on the Transparency Service's Registration Policy and the scrutiny of other Verifiers. Although this weakens their guarantees against key revocation, or against a corrupt Transparency Services, they can still keep the Receipt and blame the Issuer or the Transparency Services at a later point.

6. Signed Statement Issuance, Registration, and Verification

This section details the interoperability requirements for implementers of Signed Statements issuance and validation libraries, and of Transparency Services.

6.1. Signed Statement Envelope

Signed Statements are CBOR encoded [RFC8949] and protected by CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE [RFC9052]). Signed Statements contain a protected, an unprotected header and a payload.

All Signed Statements MUST include the following protected headers:

  • algorithm (label: 1): Asymmetric signature algorithm used by the Issuer of a Signed Statement, as an integer.
    Example: -35 is the registered algorithm identifier for ECDSA with SHA-384, see COSE Algorithms Registry [IANA.cose].

  • Key ID (label: 4): Key ID, as a bytestring

  • CWT_Claims (label: 13 pending [CWT_CLAIM_COSE]): A CWT representing the Issuer (iss) making the statement, and the Subject (sub) to correlate a collection of statements about an Artifact. Additional [CWT_CLAIMS] MAY be used, while iss and sub MUST be provided

    • iss (CWT_Claim Key 1): The Identifier of the signer, as a string
      Example: did:web:example.com

    • sub (CWT_Claim Key 2): The Subject to which the Statement refers, chosen by the Issuer
      Example: github.com/opensbom-generator/spdx-sbom-generator/releases/tag/v0.0.13

  • Registration Policy (label: TBD, temporary: 393): A map containing key/value pairs set by the Issuer which are sealed on Registration and non-opaque to the Transparency Service. The key/value pair semantics are specified by the Issuer or are specific to the CWT_Claims iss and CWT_Claims sub tuple.
    Examples: the sequence number of signed statements on a CWT_Claims Subject, Issuer metadata, or a reference to other Transparent Statements (e.g., augments, replaces, new-version, CPE-for)

  • Content type (label: 3): The media type of the payload, as a string.
    Example: application/spdx+json as the media type of SDPX in JSON encoding

In CDDL [RFC8610] notation, a Signed_Statement is defined as follows:

Signed_Statement = COSE_Sign1_Tagged

COSE_Sign1_Tagged = #6.18(COSE_Sign1)

COSE_Sign1 = [
  protected   : bstr .cbor Protected_Header,
  unprotected : Unprotected_Header,
  payload     : bstr,
  signature   : bstr
]

CWT_Claims = {
  1 => tstr; iss, the issuer making statements,
  2 => tstr; sub, the subject of the statements,
  * tstr => any
}

Reg_Info = {
  ? "register_by": uint .within (~time),
  ? "sequence_no": uint,
  ? "issuance_ts": uint .within (~time),
  ? "no_replay": null,
  * tstr => any
}

Protected_Header = {
  1   => int             ; algorithm identifier,
  4   => bstr            ; Key ID,
  13  => CWT_Claims      ; CBOR Web Token Claims,
  393 => Reg_Info        ; Registration Policy info,
  3   => tstr            ; payload type
}

Unprotected_Header = {
  ; TBD, Labels are temporary,
  ? 394 => [+ Receipt]
}

6.2. Creating Signed Statement

There are many types of Statements (such as SBOMs, malware scans, audit reports, policy definitions) that Issuers may want to turn into Signed Statements. An Issuer must first decide on a suitable format (3: payload type) to serialize the Statement payload. For a software supply chain, payloads describing the software artifacts may include:

Once the Statement is serialized with the correct media-type/content-format, an Issuer should fill in the attributes for the Registration Policy information header. From the Issuer's perspective, using attributes from named policies ensures that the Signed Statement may only be registered on Transparency Services that implement the associated policy.

For instance, if a Signed Statement is frequently updated, and it is important for Verifiers to always consider the latest version, Issuers may use the sequence_no or issuer_ts attributes.

Once all the Envelope headers are set, an Issuer MUST use a standard COSE implementation to produce an appropriately serialized Signed Statement (the SCITT tag of COSE_Sign1_Tagged is outside the scope of COSE, and used to indicate that a signed object is a Signed Statement).

6.3. Registering Signed Statements

The same Signed Statement may be independently registered in multiple Transparency Services. To register a Signed Statement, the Transparency Service performs the following steps:

  1. Client authentication: This is implementation-specific and MAY be unrelated to the Issuer identity. Signed Statements may be registered by a different party than their Issuer.

  2. Issuer Verification: The Transparency Service MUST perform resolution of the Issuer's identity. This step may require that the service retrieves the Issuer ID in real-time, or rely on a cache of recent resolutions. For auditing, during Registration, the Transparency Service MUST store evidence of the lookup, including if it was resolved from a cache.

  3. Signature verification: The Transparency Service MUST verify the signature of the Signed Statement, as described in [RFC9360], using the signature algorithm and verification key of the Issuer.

  4. Signed Statement validation: The Transparency Service MUST check that the Signed Statement includes the required protected headers listed above. The Transparency Service MAY verify the Statement payload format, content and other optional properties.

  5. Apply Registration Policy: For named policies, the Transparency Service MUST check that the required Registration Policy attributes are present in the protected headers and apply the check described in Table 1. A Transparency Service MUST reject Signed Statements that contain an attribute used for a named policy that is not enforced by the service. Custom Signed Statements are evaluated given the current Transparency Service state and the entire Envelope, and may use information contained in the attributes of named policies.

  6. Register the Signed Statement to the append-only log

  7. Return the Transparent Statement, which includes the Receipt Details about generating Receipts are described in Section 6.4.

The last two steps may be shared between a batch of Signed Statements recorded in the Append-only Log.

A Transparency Service MUST ensure that a Signed Statement is registered before releasing its Receipt, so that it can always back up the Receipt by releasing the corresponding entry (the now Transparent Statement) in the Append-only Log. Conversely, the Transparency Service MAY re-issue Receipts for the Append-only Log content, for instance after a transient fault during Signed Statement registration.

6.4. Transparent Statements and Receipts

When a Signed Statement is registered by a Transparency Service a Transparent Statement is created. This Transparent Statement consists of the Signed Statement and a Receipt. Receipts are based on COSE Signed Merkle Tree Proofs ([I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs]) with an additional wrapper structure that adds the following information:

  • version: Receipt version number MUST be set to 0 for the current implementation of this document

  • ts_identifier: The DID of the Transparency Service that issued the Receipt. Verifiers MAY use this DID as a key discovery mechanism to verify the Receipt. The verification is the same for Signed Statement and the signer MAY include the kid header parameter. Verifiers MUST support the did:web method, all other methods are optional.

The following requirements for the COSE signature of the Merkle Root are added:

  • The SCITT version header MUST be included and its value match the version field of the Receipt structure

  • The DID of Issuer header (in Signed Statements) MUST be included and its value match the ts_identifier field of the Receipt structure

  • Transparency Service MAY include the Registration policy info header to indicate to Verifiers what policies have been applied at the registration of this Statement

  • Since [I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs] uses optional headers, the crit header (id: 2) MUST be included and all SCITT-specific headers (version, DID of Transparency Service and Registration Policy) MUST be marked critical

The Transparency Service may include the registration time to help Verifiers decide about the trustworthiness of the Transparent Statement. The registration time is defined as the timestamp at which the Transparency Service has added this Signed Statement to its Append-only Log.

Receipt = [
    version: int,
    ts_identifier: tstr,
    proof: SignedMerkleTreeProof
]

; Additional protected headers
; in the COSE signed_tree_root of the SignedMerkleTreeProof
Protected_Header = {
  390 => int         ; SCITT Receipt Version
  394 => tstr        ; DID of Transparency Service (required)
  ? 393 => Reg_info  ; Registration policy information (optional)

  ; Other COSE Signed Merkle Tree headers
  ; (e.g. tree algorithm, tree size)

  ; Additional standard COSE headers
  2 => [+ label]     ; Critical headers
  ? 4 => bstr        ; Key ID (optional)
  ? 33 => COSE_X509  ; X.509 chain (optional)
}

; Details of the registration info, as provided by the TS
RegistrationInfo = {
  ? "registration_time": uint .within (~time),
  * tstr => any
}

6.5. Validation of Transparent Statements

The high-level validation algorithm is described in Section 5.3. The algorithm-specific details of checking Receipts are covered in [I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs].

Before checking a Transparent Statement, the Verifier must be configured with one or more identities of trusted Transparency Services. If more than one service is configured, the Verifier MUST return which service the Transparent Statement is registered on.

In some scenarios, the Verifier already expects a specific Issuer and Subject for the Transparent Statement, while in other cases they are not known in advance and can be an output of validation. Verifiers MAY be configured to re-verify the Issuer's signature locally, but this requires a fresh resolution of the Issuer's DID, which MAY fail if the DID document is not available or if the Statement's signing key has been revoked. Otherwise, the Verifier trusts the validation done by the Transparency Service during Registration.

Some Verifiers MAY decide to locally re-apply some or all of the Registration Policies, if they have limited trust in the Transparency Services. In addition, Verifiers MAY apply arbitrary validation policies after the signature and Receipt have been checked. Such policies may use as input all information in the Envelope, the Receipt, and the Statement payload, as well as any local state.

Verifiers MAY offer options to store or share the Receipt of the Transparent Statement for auditing the Transparency Services in case a dispute arises.

7. Federation

Note: This topic is still under discussion, see issue 79

Multiple, independently-operated Transparency Services can help secure distributed supply chains, without the need for a single, centralized service trusted by all parties. For example, multiple Transparency Service instances may be governed and operated by different organizations that are either unaware of the other or do not trust one another.

This may involve registering the same Signed Statements at different Transparency Services, each with their own purpose and Registration Policy. This may also involve attaching multiple Receipts to the same Signed Statements, each Receipt endorsing the Issuer signature and a subset of prior Receipts, and each Transparency Service verifying prior Receipts as part of their Registration Policy.

For example, a supplier may provide a complete, authoritative Transparency Service for its Signed Statements, whereas a Verifiers's Transparency Service may collect different kinds of Signed Statements to ensure complete auditing for a specific use case, and possibly require additional reviews before registering some of these Signed Statements.

An independent entities (security companies) may Issue statements of quality about different artifacts on their own Transparency Service. Verifiers choose which independent entities they trust, just as entities choose different security companies today.

8. Transparency Service API

8.1. Messages

All messages are sent as HTTP GET or POST requests.

If the Transparency Service cannot process a client's request, it MUST return an HTTP 4xx or 5xx status code, and the body MAY contain a JSON problem details object ([RFC9457]) with the following fields:

  • type: A URI reference identifying the problem. To facilitate automated response to errors, this document defines a set of standard tokens for use in the type field within the URN namespace of: "urn:ietf:params:scitt:error:".

  • detail: A human-readable string describing the error that prevented the Transparency Service from processing the request, ideally with sufficient detail to enable the error to be rectified.

Error responses MUST be sent with the Content-Type: application/problem+json HTTP header.

As an example, submitting a Signed Statement with an unsupported signature algorithm would return a 400 Bad Request status code and the following body:

{
  "type": "urn:ietf:params:scitt:error:badSignatureAlgorithm",
  "detail": "The Statement was signed with an unsupported algorithm"
}

Most error types are specific to the type of request and are defined in the respective subsections below. The one exception is the "malformed" error type, which indicates that the Transparency Service could not parse the client's request because it did not comply with this document:

  • Error code: malformed (The request could not be parsed).

Clients MUST treat 500 and 503 HTTP status code responses as transient failures and MAY retry the same request without modification at a later date. Note that in the case of a 503 response, the Transparency Service MAY include a Retry-After header field per [RFC9110] in order to request a minimum time for the client to wait before retrying the request. In the absence of this header field, this document does not specify a minimum.

8.1.1. Register Signed Statement

8.1.1.1. Request
POST <Base URL>/entries

Headers:

  • Content-Type: application/cose

Body: SCITT COSE_Sign1 message

8.1.1.2. Response

One of the following:

  • Status 201 - Registration is successful.

    • Header Location: <Base URL>/entries/<Entry ID>

    • Header Content-Type: application/json

    • Body { "entryId": "<Entry ID"> }

  • Status 202 - Registration is running.

    • Header Location: <Base URL>/operations/<Operation ID>

    • Header Content-Type: application/json

    • (Optional) Header: Retry-After: <seconds>

    • Body { "operationId": "<Operation ID>", "status": "running" }

  • Status 400 - Registration was unsuccessful due to invalid input.

    • Error code badSignatureAlgorithm

    • TBD: more error codes to be defined, see #17

If HTTP code 202 is returned, then clients must wait until Registration succeeded or failed by polling the Registration status using the Operation ID returned in the response. Clients MUST NOT report registration is complete until an HTTP code 202 response has been received. A time out of the Client MUST be treated as a registration failure, even though the transparency service may eventually complete the registration.

8.1.2. Retrieve Operation Status

8.1.2.1. Request
GET <Base URL>/operations/<Operation ID>
8.1.2.2. Response

One of the following:

  • Status 200 - Registration is running

    • Header: Content-Type: application/json

    • (Optional) Header: Retry-After: <seconds>

    • Body: { "operationId": "<Operation ID>", "status": "running" }

  • Status 200 - Registration was successful

    • Header: Location: <Base URL>/entries/<Entry ID>

    • Header: Content-Type: application/json

    • Body: { "operationId": "<Operation ID>", "status": "succeeded", "entryId": "<Entry ID>" }

  • Status 200 - Registration failed

    • Header Content-Type: application/json

    • Body: { "operationId": "<Operation ID>", "status": "failed", "error": { "type": "<type>", "detail": "<detail>" } }

    • Error code: badSignatureAlgorithm

    • TODO: more error codes to be defined, see #17

  • Status 404 - Unknown Operation ID

    • Error code: operationNotFound

    • This can happen if the operation ID has expired and been deleted.

If an operation failed, then error details MUST be embedded as a JSON problem details object in the "error" field.

If an operation ID is invalid (i.e., it does not correspond to any submit operation), a service may return either a 404 or a running status. This is because differentiating between the two may not be possible in an eventually consistent system.

8.1.3. Retrieve Signed Statement

8.1.3.1. Request
GET <Base URL>/entries/<Entry ID>

Query parameters:

  • (Optional) embedReceipt=true

If the query parameter embedReceipt=true is provided, then the Signed Statement is returned with the corresponding Registration Receipt embedded in the COSE unprotected header.

8.1.3.2. Response

One of the following:

  • Status 200.

    • Header: Content-Type: application/cose

    • Body: COSE_Sign1

  • Status 404 - Entry not found.

    • Error code: entryNotFound

8.1.4. Retrieve Registration Receipt

8.1.4.1. Request
GET <Base URL>/entries/<Entry ID>/receipt
8.1.4.2. Response

One of the following:

  • Status 200.

    • Header: Content-Type: application/cbor

    • Body: SCITT_Receipt

  • Status 404 - Entry not found.

    • Error code: entryNotFound

The retrieved Receipt may be embedded in the corresponding COSE_Sign1 document in the unprotected header.

9. Privacy Considerations

Unless advertised by a Transparency Service, every Issuer must treat Signed Statements it registered (rendering them as Transparent Statements) as public. In particular, a Signed Statement Envelope and Statement payload MUST NOT carry any private information in plaintext.

10. Security Considerations

On its own, verifying a Transparent Statement does not guarantee that its Envelope or contents are trustworthy. Just that they have been signed by the apparent Issuer and counter-signed by the Transparency Service. If the Verifier trusts the Issuer, it can infer that an Issuer's Signed Statement was issued with this Envelope and contents, which may be interpreted as the Issuer saying the Artifact is fit for its intended purpose. If the Verifier trusts the Transparency Service, it can independently infer that the Signed Statement passed the Transparency Service Registration Policy and that has been persisted in the Append-only Log. Unless advertised in the Transparency Service Registration Policy, the Verifier cannot assume that the ordering of Signed Statements in the Append-only Log matches the ordering of their issuance.

Similarly, the fact that an Issuer can be held accountable for its Transparent Statements does not on its own provide any mitigation or remediation mechanism in case one of these Transparent Statements turned out to be misleading or malicious. Just that signed evidence will be available to support them.

An Issuer that knows of a changed state of quality for an Artifact, SHOULD Register a new Signed Statement, using the same 13 CWT iss and sub claims.

Issuers MUST ensure that the Statement payloads in their Signed Statements are correct and unambiguous, for example by avoiding ill-defined or ambiguous formats that may cause Verifiers to interpret the Signed Statement as valid for some other purpose.

Issuers and Transparency Services MUST carefully protect their private signing keys and avoid these keys being used for any purpose not described in this architecture document. In cases where key re-use is unavoidable, keys MUST NOT sign any other message that may be verified as an Envelope as part of a Signed Statement.

10.1. Threat Model

The document provides a generic threat model for SCITT, describing its residual security properties when some of its actors (identity providers, Issuers, Transparency Services, and Auditors) are corrupt or compromised.

This model may need to be refined to account for specific supply chains and use cases.

10.1.1. Signed Statement Authentication and Transparency

SCITT primarily supports checking of Signed Statement authenticity, both from the Issuer (authentication) and from the Transparency Service (transparency). These guarantees are meant to hold for extensive periods of time, possibly decades.

It can never be assumed that some Issuers and some Transparency Services will not be corrupt.

SCITT entities explicitly trust one another on the basis of their long-term identity, which maps to shorter-lived cryptographic credentials. A Verifier SHOULD validate a Transparent Statement originating from a given Issuer, registered at a given Transparency Service (both identified in the Verifier's local authorization policy) and would not depend on any other Issuer or Transparency Services.

Authorized supply chain actors (Issuers) cannot be stopped from producing Signed Statements including false assertions in their Statement payload (either by mistake or by corruption), but these Issuers can made accountable by ensuring their Signed Statements are systematically registered at a trustworthy Transparency Service.

Similarly, providing strong residual guarantees against faulty/corrupt Transparency Services is a SCITT design goal. Preventing a Transparency Service from registering Signed Statements that do not meet its stated Registration Policy, or to issue Receipts that are not consistent with their Append-only Log is not possible. In contrast Transparency Services can be held accountable and they can be called out by any Auditor that replays their Append-only Log against any contested Receipt. Note that the SCITT Architecture does not require trust in a single centralized Transparency Service. Different actors may rely on different Transparency Services, each registering a subset of Signed Statements subject to their own policy.

In both cases, the SCITT Architecture provides generic, universally-verifiable cryptographic proof to individually blame Issuers or the Transparency Service. On one hand, this enables valid actors to detect and disambiguate malicious actors who issue contradictory Signed Statements to different entities (Verifiers, Auditors, Issuers), otherwise known as 'equivocation'. On the other hand, their liability and the resulting damage to their reputation are application specific, and out of scope of the SCITT Architecture.

Verifiers and Auditors need not be trusted by other actors. In particular, so long as actors maintain proper control of their signing keys and identity infrastructure they cannot "frame" an Issuer or a Transparency Service for Signed Statements they did not issue or register.

10.1.1.1. Append-only Log

If a Transparency Service is honest, then a Transparent Statement including a correct Receipt ensures that the associated Signed Statement passed its Registration Policy and was recorded appropriately.

Conversely, a corrupt Transparency Service may:

  1. refuse or delay the Registration of Signed Statements

  2. register Signed Statements that do not pass its Registration Policy (e.g., Signed Statement with Issuer identities and signatures that do not verify)

  3. issue verifiable Receipts for Signed Statements that do not match its Append-only Log

  4. refuse access to its Transparency Service (e.g., to Auditors, possibly after storage loss)

An Auditor granted (partial) access to a Transparency Service and to a collection of disputed Receipts will be able to replay it, detect any invalid Registration (2) or incorrect Receipt in this collection (3), and blame the Transparency Service for them. This ensures any Verifier that trusts at least one such Auditor that (2, 3) will be blamed to the Transparency Service.

Due to the operational challenge of maintaining a globally consistent Append-only Log, some Transparency Services may provide limited support for historical queries on the Signed Statements they have registered, and accept the risk of being blamed for inconsistent Registration or Issuer equivocation.

Verifiers and Auditors may also witness (1, 4) but may not be able to collect verifiable evidence for it.

10.1.1.2. Availability of Transparent Statement

Networking and Storage are trusted only for availability.

Auditing may involve access to data beyond what is persisted in the Transparency Services. For example, the registered Transparency Service may include only the hash of a detailed SBOM, which may limit the scope of auditing.

Resistance to denial-of-service is implementation specific.

Actors may want to independently keep their own record of the Signed Statements they issue, endorse, verify, or audit.

10.1.2. Confidentiality and Privacy

According to Zero Trust Principles any location in a network is never trusted. All contents exchanged between actors is protected using secure authenticated channels (e.g., TLS) but may not exclude network traffic analysis.

10.1.2.1. Signed Statements and Their Registration

The Transparency Service is trusted with the confidentiality of the Signed Statements presented for Registration. Some Transparency Services may publish every Signed Statement in their logs, to facilitate their dissemination and auditing. Others may just return Receipts to clients that present Singed Statements for Registration, and disclose the Append-only Log only to Auditors trusted with the confidentiality of its contents.

A collection of Signed Statements must not leak information about the contents of other Signed Statements registered on the Transparency Service.

Issuers must carefully review the inclusion of private/confidential materials in their Statements. For example, Issuers must remove Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as clear text in the statement. Alternatively, Issuers may include opaque cryptographic statements, such as hashes.

10.1.2.2. Queries to the Transparency Service

The confidentiality of queries is implementation-specific, and generally not guaranteed. For example, while offline Envelope validation of Signed Statements is private, a Transparency Service may monitor which of its Transparent Statements are being verified from lookups to ensure their freshness.

10.1.3. Cryptographic Assumptions

SCITT relies on standard cryptographic security for signing schemes (EUF-CMA: for a given key, given the public key and any number of signed messages, an attacker cannot forge a valid signature for any other message) and for Receipts schemes (log collision-resistance: for a given commitment such as a Merkle-tree root, there is a unique log such that any valid path authenticates a Signed Statement in this log.)

The SCITT Architecture supports cryptographic agility. The actors depend only on the subset of signing and Receipt schemes they trust. This enables the gradual transition to stronger algorithms, including e.g. post-quantum signature algorithms.

10.1.4. Transparency Service Clients

Trust in clients that submit Signed Statements for Registration is implementation-specific. An attacker may attempt to register any Signed Statement it has obtained, at any Transparency Service that accepts them, possibly multiple times and out of order. This may be mitigated by a Transparency Service that enforces restrictive access control and Registration Policies.

10.1.5. Identity

The identity resolution mechanism is trusted to associate long-term identifiers with their public signature-verification keys. Transparency Services and other parties may record identity-resolution evidence to facilitate its auditing.

If one of the credentials of an Issuer gets compromised, the SCITT Architecture still guarantees the authenticity of all Signed Statements signed with this credential that have been registered on a Transparency Service before the compromise. It is up to the Issuer to notify Transparency Services of credential revocation to stop Verifiers from accepting Signed Statements signed with compromised credentials. Issuers SHOULD register new Signed Statements indicating the revocation, using the same 13 CWT iss and sub claims.

The confidentiality of any identity lookup during Signed Statement Registration or Transparent Statement Verification is out of scope.

11. IANA Considerations

TBD; Section 4.

11.1. URN Sub-namespace for SCITT (urn:ietf:params:scitt)

IANA is requested to register the URN sub-namespace urn:ietf:params:scitt in the "IETF URN Sub-namespace for Registered Protocol Parameter Identifiers" Registry [IANA.params], following the template in [RFC3553]:

   Registry name:  scitt

   Specification:  [RFCthis]

   Repository:  http://www.iana.org/assignments/scitt

   Index value:  No transformation needed.

12. References

12.1. Normative References

[COSWID]
"COSWID Specification", n.d., <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9393.pdf>.
[CWT_CLAIM_COSE]
"CBOR Web Token (CWT) Claims in COSE Headers", n.d., <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cose-cwt-claims-in-headers/>.
[IANA.cose]
IANA, "CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE)", <http://www.iana.org/assignments/cose>.
[IANA.params]
IANA, "Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for IETF Use", <http://www.iana.org/assignments/params>.
[RFC2119]
Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.
[RFC3553]
Mealling, M., Masinter, L., Hardie, T., and G. Klyne, "An IETF URN Sub-namespace for Registered Protocol Parameters", BCP 73, RFC 3553, DOI 10.17487/RFC3553, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3553>.
[RFC6838]
Freed, N., Klensin, J., and T. Hansen, "Media Type Specifications and Registration Procedures", BCP 13, RFC 6838, DOI 10.17487/RFC6838, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6838>.
[RFC8174]
Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.
[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, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8610>.
[RFC8949]
Bormann, C. and P. Hoffman, "Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)", STD 94, RFC 8949, DOI 10.17487/RFC8949, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8949>.
[RFC9052]
Schaad, J., "CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE): Structures and Process", STD 96, RFC 9052, DOI 10.17487/RFC9052, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9052>.
[RFC9110]
Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "HTTP Semantics", STD 97, RFC 9110, DOI 10.17487/RFC9110, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110>.
[RFC9360]
Schaad, J., "CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE): Header Parameters for Carrying and Referencing X.509 Certificates", RFC 9360, DOI 10.17487/RFC9360, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9360>.
[RFC9457]
Nottingham, M., Wilde, E., and S. Dalal, "Problem Details for HTTP APIs", RFC 9457, DOI 10.17487/RFC9457, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9457>.

12.2. Informative References

[CWT_CLAIMS]
"CBOR Web Token (CWT) Claims", n.d., <https://www.iana.org/assignments/cwt/cwt.xhtml>.
[CycloneDX]
"CycloneDX", n.d., <https://cyclonedx.org/specification/overview/>.
[DID-CORE]
W3C, "Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0", , <https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/>.
[DID-WEB]
"did:web Decentralized Identifiers Method Spec", n.d., <https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-method-web/>.
[I-D.draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs]
Steele, O., Birkholz, H., Delignat-Lavaud, A., and C. Fournet, "Concise Encoding of Signed Merkle Tree Proofs", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs-01, , <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-steele-cose-merkle-tree-proofs-01>.
[I-D.ietf-scitt-software-use-cases]
Birkholz, H., Deshpande, Y., Brooks, D., Martin, B., and B. Knight, "Detailed Software Supply Chain Uses Cases for SCITT", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-scitt-software-use-cases-02, , <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-scitt-software-use-cases-02>.
[in-toto]
"in-toto", n.d., <https://in-toto.io/>.
[MERKLE]
Merkle, R., "A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function", Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO ’87 pp. 369-378, DOI 10.1007/3-540-48184-2_32, ISBN ["9783540187967", "9783540481843"], , <https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48184-2_32>.
[PBFT]
Castro, M. and B. Liskov, "Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery", Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM Transactions on Computer Systems vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 398-461, DOI 10.1145/571637.571640, , <https://doi.org/10.1145/571637.571640>.
[RFC6024]
Reddy, R. and C. Wallace, "Trust Anchor Management Requirements", RFC 6024, DOI 10.17487/RFC6024, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6024>.
[RFC9162]
Laurie, B., Messeri, E., and R. Stradling, "Certificate Transparency Version 2.0", RFC 9162, DOI 10.17487/RFC9162, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9162>.
[RFC9334]
Birkholz, H., Thaler, D., Richardson, M., Smith, N., and W. Pan, "Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) Architecture", RFC 9334, DOI 10.17487/RFC9334, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9334>.
[SLSA]
"SLSA", n.d., <https://slsa.dev/>.
[SPDX-CBOR]
"SPDX Specification", n.d., <https://spdx.dev/use/specifications/>.
[SPDX-JSON]
"SPDX Specification", n.d., <https://spdx.dev/use/specifications/>.
[SWID]
"SWID Specification", n.d., <https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Software-Identification-SWID/guidelines>.

Contributors

Orie Steele
Transmute
United States

Orie contributed to improving the generalization of COSE building blocks and document consistency.

Authors' Addresses

Henk Birkholz
Fraunhofer SIT
Rheinstrasse 75
64295 Darmstadt
Germany
Antoine Delignat-Lavaud
Microsoft Research
21 Station Road
Cambridge
CB1 2FB
United Kingdom
Cedric Fournet
Microsoft Research
21 Station Road
Cambridge
CB1 2FB
United Kingdom
Yogesh Deshpande
ARM
110 Fulbourn Road
Cambridge
CB1 9NJ
United Kingdom
Steve Lasker
RKVST
Seattle,
United States