Name: Secure Asset Transfer Protocol (SAT)

Description

There is currently a growing interest in several industry sectors of using the Internet as the foundation for the exchange of digital assets. While numerous communities and networks have emerged around specific types of digital assets, there is a lack of a standard protocol that permit the transfer of digital assets from one community/network to another.

The goal of SAT is to develop a standard protocol that enables the secure and non-repudiable transfer a digital asset from one network to another. The protocol must ensure that non-repudiability of transfers is achieved, and that the classic properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) must be satisfied.

The requirement of consistency implies that asset transfer protocol always leaves both networks in a consistent state (that the asset located in one network only). Atomicity means that the protocol must guarantee that either the transfer commits (completes) or entirely fails, where failure is taken to mean there is no change to the state of the asset in the origin network.

The property of isolation means that while a transfer is occurring to a digital asset from an origin network, no other state changes can occur to the asset. The property of durability means that once the transfer has been committed by both networks, that this commitment must hold regardless of subsequent unavailability (e.g. crash) of the entities implementing the transfer protocol.

SAT will use existing IETF standards for various aspects of the protocol, including secure channel establishment (TLS), payload formats (JSON/JWT), digital signatures and encryption (JOSE, JWE), digital certificates (PKIX) and others.

Required Details

• Status: WG Forming.

• Responsible AD: Roman Danyliw / Paul Wouters (Security Area); or Francesca Palombini /Murray Kucherawy (Applications area).

• BOF proponents: Thomas Hardjono <hardjono@mit.edu>, Martin Hargreaves <martin.hargreaves@quant.network>, Rama Ramakrishna <vramakr2@in.ibm.com>, Ned Smith <ned.smith@intel.com>

• BOF chairs: Thomas Hardjono, Martin Hargreaves, Ned Smith

• Number of people expected to attend: 60.

• Length of session (1 or 2 hours): 2 hours.

• Chair Conflicts: RATS WG.

Information for IAB/IESG

To allow evaluation of your proposal, please include the following items:

There is currently no standard protocol to perform transfer of digital assets from one network to another. However, there have been some network-specific open source projects that are exploring this problem. There are also some commercial implementations of proprietary protocols.

The following is a list of currently known related open source projects:

Weaver: https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/weaver-dlt-interoperability

Cactus: https://github.com/hyperledger/cactus/tree/main/packages/cactus-plugin-odap-hermes

Compellio: https://github.com/compellio/tz-verifiable-data-registry/tree/testnet

Agenda

• Items, drafts, speakers, timing (TBD)
• Or a URL

Links to the mailing list, draft charter if any, relevant Internet-Drafts, etc.

• Mailing List: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sat

• Draft charter (TBD): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-EXAMPLE/

• Relevant drafts:

  • Draft of SAT protocol
    • https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-hargreaves-sat-core-00.txt
  • SAT architecture (TBD):
    • https://datatracker.ietf.org/html/draft-sat-architecture-TBD
  • SAT Use Cases (TBD):
    • https://datatracker.ietf.org/html/draft-sat-usecases-TBD