Geographic Attestation Results
draft-richardson-rats-geographic-results-00
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| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Michael Richardson | ||
| Last updated | 2025-10-17 | ||
| RFC stream | (None) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
| Formats | |||
| Stream | Stream state | (No stream defined) | |
| Consensus boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
| IESG | IESG state | I-D Exists | |
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draft-richardson-rats-geographic-results-00
RATS (if adopted) M. Richardson
Internet-Draft Sandelman Software Works
Intended status: Standards Track 17 October 2025
Expires: 20 April 2026
Geographic Attestation Results
draft-richardson-rats-geographic-results-00
Abstract
Many workloads have limitations on what geography they are allowed to
operate in. This is often due to a regulation that requires that the
computation occur in a particular jurisdiction.
This document is about encoding a variety of geographical conclusions
in an Attestation Result.
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-richardson-rats-geographic-
results/.
Discussion of this document takes place on the RATS Working Group
mailing list (mailto:rats@ietf.org), which is archived at
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/rats/. Subscribe at
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rats/.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/mcr/geographicresult.
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
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 20 April 2026.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2025 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
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Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Claim definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. CDDL Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Introduction
Resolving the question of where certain computations occurs can be
critical to assessing how much trust to put into the result.
Example. Example. Example.
[I-D.ietf-rats-ear] provides a framework that allows an [RFC9334]
Verifier to return a conclusion as to geographic region for an Target
Environment.
While [RFC9711], Section 4.2.10 provides a very good WGS84 based
location claim, often very suitable as Evidence, it is not ideal for
the use by Relying Parties. There are a few reasons:
* the latitude and longitude describe a location on the Earth. The
Relying Party is seldom interested in that level of detail. It
needs to know if it's in the correct place.
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* the geographic position leaks significant amount of private
information that is not necessary for the Relying Party to know.
* for many activities, it is the Legal Jurisdiction that matters,
not the actual location. Jurisdictions often do not have well
defined concentric boundaries. For instance, the Korean
Consultate in Los Angelos is usually for Legal purposes, in Korea.
Yet, only a few meters away, possibly below the level of WGS84
accuracy, the jurisdiction would be different.
This document offers a new set of structured abstract claims that
provides an evaluated view of where a Target Environment is. The
mechanism to do this appraisal may depend upon a number of factors
which may be related to physical geographic position, but also
include other considerations.
For instance, a claim that Target Environment is less than 1ns (as
light travels in a fiber optic cable) away from another Target
Enviroment whose location is known. A typical fiber optic cable has
a speed of 200,000 kilometers per second (slower than light in a
vacuum to the index of refraction of the glass involved. So if the
round trip time between environments is 1ns, then the distance
between Target Environments can be appraised to be within 1m of each
other.
2. Conventions and Definitions
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.
3. Claim definition
This claim definition goes into the EAR submods map. Mumble mumble.
AR4SI + $ear CDDL TBD.
Geographic Results can contain one or more of the following claims.
1. jurisdiction-country = ISO3361 country code.
2. jurisdiction-country-exclave = booleann
3. jurisdiction-state = country-specific list
4. jurisdiction-state-exclave = country-specific-list
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5. jurisdiction-city = state-specific list
6. jurisdiction-city-exclave = state-specific-list
7. enclosing-exclave-country = ISO3361 country code
8. near-to = another entity+distance
9. rack-U-number = ordinal, numbered from bottom RU as 1.
10. cabinet-number = ordinal, DC specific ordering, might ignore
hallway, room and floor
11. hallway-number = ordinal
12. room-numbr = string
13. floor-number = string, usually representing an integer.
There are some additional things which may be received as Evidence,
but which is sometimes important to convert to Results, having
verified some aspects. (TBD) 1. range-to-tower = designation of
tower, distance-readings 2.
(NOTE: There are apparently exclaves that ar inside other countries
exclaves, like Nahwa. Unclear if exclave information is even
relevant, or if second order matters at all)
4. CDDL Definition
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; # import rfc9711 as eat
; # import rfcXXXX as corim
$$ear-appraisal-extension //= (
ear.geographic-result-label => geographic-result-claims
)
geographic-result-claims = non-empty<{
? grc.jurisdiction-country-label => iso-3361-alpha-2-country-code
? grc.jurisdiction-country-exclave-label => bool
? grc.jurisdiction-state-label => tstr .size (2..16)
? grc.jurisdiction-state-exclave-label => bool
? grc.jurisdiction-city-label => tstr .size(2..16)
? grc.jurisdiction-city-exclave-label => bool
? grc.enclosing-exclave-country-label => iso-3361-alpha-2-country-code
? grc.near-to-label => corim.uuid-type
? grc.rack-U-number-label => uint .gt 0
? grc.cabinet-number => uint .gt 0
? grc.hallway-number => uint
? grc.room-number => tstr .size (2..64)
? grc.floor-number => int
}>
ear.geographic-result-label = eat.JC<"TBD02", TBD01>
grc.jurisdiction-country-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-country", 0>
grc.jurisdiction-country-exclave-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-country-exclave", 1>
grc.jurisdiction-state-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-state", 2>
grc.jurisdiction-state-exclave-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-state-exclave", 3>
grc.jurisdiction-city-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-city", 4>
grc.jurisdiction-city-exclave-label = eat.JC<"grc.jurisdiction-city-exclave", 5>
grc.enclosing-exclave-country-label = eat.JC<"grc.enclosing-exclave-country", 6>
grc.near-to-label = eat.JC<"grc.near-to", 7>
grc.rack-U-number-label = eat.JC<"grc.rack-U-number", 8>
grc.cabinet-number = eat.JC<"grc.cabinet-number", 9>
grc.hallway-number = eat.JC<"grc.hallway-number", 10>
grc.room-number = eat.JC<"grc.room-number", 10>
grc.floor-number = eat.JC<"grc.floor-number", 11>
iso-3361-alpha-2-country-code = tstr .size 2
5. Security Considerations
TODO Security
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6. IANA Considerations
IANA is asked to allocate TBD01 from the "CBOR Web Token Claims"
registry [IANA.cwt], and TBD02 (suggestion: "ear.geographic-result-
claims") from the "JSON Web Token Claims" registry [IANA.jwt].
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[I-D.ietf-rats-ear]
Fossati, T., Voit, E., Trofimov, S., and H. Birkholz, "EAT
Attestation Results", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft,
draft-ietf-rats-ear-01, 24 July 2025,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-rats-
ear-01>.
[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/rfc/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/rfc/rfc8174>.
[RFC9334] Birkholz, H., Thaler, D., Richardson, M., Smith, N., and
W. Pan, "Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS)
Architecture", RFC 9334, DOI 10.17487/RFC9334, January
2023, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9334>.
[RFC9711] Lundblade, L., Mandyam, G., O'Donoghue, J., and C.
Wallace, "The Entity Attestation Token (EAT)", RFC 9711,
DOI 10.17487/RFC9711, April 2025,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9711>.
7.2. Informative References
[IANA.cwt] IANA, "CBOR Web Token (CWT) Claims",
<https://www.iana.org/assignments/cwt>.
[IANA.jwt] IANA, "JSON Web Token (JWT)",
<https://www.iana.org/assignments/jwt>.
[ptp] Wikipedia, "Precision Time Protocol", 7 October 2025,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol>.
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[speed] Genuine Modules, "How fast does fiber optics travel?", 7
October 2025, <https://www.genuinemodules.com/how-fast-
does-fiber-optics-travel_a6553>.
Acknowledgments
TODO acknowledge.
Author's Address
Michael Richardson
Sandelman Software Works
Email: mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca
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