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Secure Reporting of Update Status
draft-ietf-suit-report-00

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Active".
Author Brendan Moran
Last updated 2021-07-12
Replaces draft-moran-suit-report
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Sep 2022
Submit SUIT Status Tracker document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard
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draft-ietf-suit-report-00
SUIT                                                            B. Moran
Internet-Draft                                               Arm Limited
Intended status: Informational                             July 12, 2021
Expires: January 13, 2022

                   Secure Reporting of Update Status
                       draft-ietf-suit-report-00

Abstract

   The Software Update for the Internet of Things (SUIT) manifest
   provides a way for many different update and boot workflows to be
   described by a common format.  However, this does not provide a
   feedback mechanism for developers in the event that an update or boot
   fails.

   This specification describes a lightweight feedback mechanism that
   allows a developer in possession of a manifest to reconstruct the
   decisions made and actions performed by a manifest processor.

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 January 13, 2022.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect

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   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Conventions and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  The SUIT Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  The SUIT Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   8.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7

1.  Introduction

   A SUIT manifest processor can fail to install or boot an update for
   many reasons.  Frequently, the error codes generated by such systems
   fail to provide developers with enough information to find root
   causes and produce corrective actions, resulting in extra effort to
   reproduce failures.  Logging the results of each SUIT command can
   simplify this process.

   While it is possible to report the results of SUIT commands through
   existing logging or attestation mechanisms, this comes with several
   drawbacks:

   -  data inflation, particularly when designed for text-based logging

   -  missing information elements

   -  missing support for multiple components

   The CBOR objects defined in this document allow devices to:

   -  report a trace of how an update was performed

   -  report expected vs. actual values for critical checks

   -  describe the installation of complex multi-component architectures

   This document provides a definition of a SUIT-specific logging
   container that may be used in a variety of scenarios.

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2.  Conventions and Terminology

   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.

   Terms used in this specification include:

   -  Boot: initialization of an executable image.  Although this
      specification refers to boot, any boot-specific operations
      described are equally applicable to starting an executable in an
      OS context.

3.  The SUIT Record

   If the developer can be assumed to have a copy of the manifest, then
   they need little information to reconstruct what the manifest
   processor has done.  They simply need any data that influences the
   control flow of the manifest.  The manifest only supports the
   following control flow primitives:

   -  Set Component/Dependency Index

   -  Set/Override Parameters

   -  Try-Each

   -  Run Sequence

   -  Conditions.

   Of these, only conditions change the behavior of the processor from
   the default, and then only when the condition fails.

   Then, to reconstruct the flow of a manifest, all a developer needs is
   a list of metadata about failed conditions:

   -  the current manifest

   -  the current section

   -  the offset into the current section

   -  the current component index

   -  the "reason" for failure

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   Most conditions compare a parameter to an actual value, so the
   "reason" is typically simply the actual value.

   Since it is possible that a non-condition command may fail in an
   exceptional circumstance, this must be included as well.  To
   accommodate for a failed command, the list of failed conditions is
   expanded to be a list of failed commands instead.  In the case of a
   command failure, the failure reason is typically a numeric error
   code.

   Reconstructing what a device has done in this way is compact, however
   it requires some reconstruction effort.  This is an issue that can be
   solved by tooling.

   suit-record = {
       suit-record-manifest-id        => [* uint ],
       suit-record-manifest-section   => int,
       suit-record-section-offset     => uint,
       (
           suit-record-component-index  => uint //
           suit-record-dependency-index => uint
       ),
       suit-record-failure-reason     => SUIT_Parameters / int,
   }

   suit-record-manifest-id is used to identify which manifest contains
   the command that caused the record to be generated.  The manifest id
   is a list of integers that form a walk of the manifest tree, starting
   at the root.  An empty list indicates that the command was contained
   in the root manifest.  If the list is not empty, the command was
   contained in one of the root manifest's dependencies, or nested even
   further below that.

   For example, suppose that the root manifest has 3 dependencies and
   each of those dependencies has 2 dependencies of its own:

   -  Root

      o  Dependency A

         *  Dependency A0

         *  Dependency A1

      o  Dependency B

         *  Dependency B0

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         *  Dependency B1

      o  Dependency C

         *  Dependency C0

         *  Dependency C1

   A manifest-id of [1,0] would indicate that the current command was
   contained within Dependency B0.  Similarly, a manifest-id of [2,1]
   would indicate Dependency C1

   suit-record-manifest-section indicates which section of the manifest
   was active.  This is used in addition to an offset so that the
   developer can index into severable sections in a predictable way.
   The value of this element is the value of the key that identified the
   section in the manifest.

   suit-record-section-offset is the number of bytes into the current
   section at which the current command is located.

   suit-record-component-index is the index of the component that was
   specified at the time that the report was generated.  This field is
   necessary due to the availability of set-current-component values of
   True and a list of components.  Both of these values cause the
   manifest processor to loop over commands using a series of component-
   ids , so the developer needs to know which was selected when the
   command executed.

   suit-record-dependency-index is similar to suit-record-component-
   index but is used to identify the dependency that was active.

   suit-record-failure-reason contains the reason for the command
   failure.  For example, this could be the actual value of a
   SUIT_Digest or class identifier.  This is encoded in a
   SUIT_Parameters block as defined in [I-D.ietf-suit-manifest].  If it
   is not a condition that has failed, but a directive, then the value
   of this element is an integer that represents an implementation-
   defined failure code.

4.  The SUIT Report

   Some metadata is common to all records, such as the root manifest:
   the manifest that is the entry-point for the manifest processor.
   This metadata is aggregated with a list of suit-records.

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   suit-report = {
       suit-report-manifest-digest => SUIT_Digest,
       ? suit-report-manifest-uri  => tstr,
       ? suit-report-nonce         => bstr,
       suit-report-records         => [ *suit-record ]
   }

   suit-report-manifest-digest provides a SUIT_Digest (as defined in
   [I-D.ietf-suit-manifest]) that is the characteristic digest of the
   Root manifest.

   suit-report-manifest-uri provides the reference URI that was provided
   in the root manifest.

   suit-report-nonce provides a container for freshness or replay
   protection information.  This field MAY be omitted where the suit-
   report is authenticated within a container that provides freshness
   already.  For example, attestation evidence typically contains a
   proof of freshness.

   suit-report-records is a list of 0 or more SUIT Records.  Because
   SUIT Records are only generated on failure, in simple cases this can
   be an empty list.

5.  IANA Considerations

   IANA is requested to allocate a CBOR tag for the SUIT Report.

6.  Security Considerations

   The SUIT Report should either be carried over a secure transport, or
   signed, or both.  Ideally, attestation should be used to prove that
   the report was generated by legitimate hardware.

7.  Acknowledgements

8.  Normative References

   [I-D.ietf-suit-manifest]
              Moran, B., Tschofenig, H., Birkholz, H., and K. Zandberg,
              "A Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)-based
              Serialization Format for the Software Updates for Internet
              of Things (SUIT) Manifest", draft-ietf-suit-manifest-12
              (work in progress), February 2021.

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   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

Author's Address

   Brendan Moran
   Arm Limited

   EMail: Brendan.Moran@arm.com

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