Selective Disclosure for Succession Receipts
draft-sabey-succession-receipts-sd-00

Individual Submission                                           J. Sabey
Internet-Draft                                   Continuity Laboratories
Intended status: Informational                              18 July 2026
Expires: 19 January 2027

              Selective Disclosure for Succession Receipts
                 draft-sabey-succession-receipts-sd-00

Abstract

   A Succession Receipt proves one completed, policy-gated transfer of
   authority between autonomous agents, and it is all-or-nothing:
   whoever holds the receipt holds every claim and every evidence event
   in it.  In regulated deployments the parties entitled to verify a
   transfer are not all entitled to read it in full — a regulator, a
   counterparty, and the public each warrant a different view.  This
   document specifies a selective-disclosure form of the receipt: the
   issuer signs salted commitments to each claim unit and each evidence
   event, disclosures travel outside the signature, and a projection —
   the signed envelope plus any subset of the disclosures — still
   verifies against the one issuer signature.  Withholding never breaks
   the proof, disclosing never re-signs, withheld content remains
   visibly committed, and a projection that opens every commitment is
   verifiable to exactly the strength of the underlying receipt.  The
   disclosure mechanism deliberately follows the salted-digest analysis
   of SD-JWT, restated for plain-JSON documents canonicalized with the
   JSON Canonicalization Scheme.

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 19 January 2027.

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2026 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 to this document.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  The Document  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Commitments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.2.  The Version 0.1 Disclosure Units  . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  Canonicalization and Signatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Verification  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  Projection Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   7.  Versioning and Stability  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   8.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12

1.  Introduction

   Succession Receipts [SR-ID] make one completed transfer of authority
   between agents verifiable offline: the claims, the legitimacy
   determination, the obligation lineage, and the signed evidence events
   grounding all of it travel in one signed document.  That completeness
   is the format's strength and its disclosure problem.  The evidence
   names parties, scopes, and lineage; a receipt handed to a regulator
   to prove _this transfer was approved under that legitimacy
   evaluation_ also hands over every business-identifying detail it
   carries.

   A *Selective-Disclosure Receipt (SDR)* is the receipt rebuilt for
   that reality.  The issuer signs, once, an envelope containing *salted
   commitments* — one per claim unit, one per evidence event.  The
   values themselves travel as *disclosures* outside the signed content.
   A *projection* is the envelope plus any subset of the disclosures,
   and it verifies against the one issuer signature: each disclosure

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   reopens its commitment or the projection fails; nothing about
   withholding a disclosure disturbs the proof; and producing a narrower
   view for a new audience is dropping disclosures, never re-signing.

   Three properties distinguish the design:

   *  *Withholding is visible, never silent.* The commitment arrays are
      inside the signed envelope, so a verifier of any projection knows
      exactly how many claims and evidence events exist and which it is
      not seeing.  An undisclosed claim is known-withheld, never
      deniable.

   *  *"Verified" and "grounded" are separate statements.* Verification
      reports each claim unit as grounded (its supporting evidence was
      disclosed and checks out), disclosed (bound to the issuer's
      signature, supporting evidence withheld), or undisclosed.  A
      projection cannot misrepresent; what it proves is exactly what its
      report says.

   *  *Complete projections escalate.* A projection that opens every
      commitment MUST be verified under the full Succession Receipts
      claim semantics [SR-ID], including the bidirectional completeness
      rules no partial view can enforce.  This is both the issuance gate
      and the holder's acceptance check: a lying issuer is caught at
      acceptance, not discovered by a regulator later.

   The mechanism is deliberately that of SD-JWT [SD-JWT] and its
   credential profile [SD-JWT-VC] — salted digests of the hidden values
   inside the signed body, disclosures shipped alongside, projection by
   omission — and this document inherits that work's analysis.  What it
   contributes is the mechanism's application to the succession claim
   set, and an encoding for *plain-JSON documents* under the JSON
   Canonicalization Scheme [RFC8785] with the Succession Receipts
   signature discipline, where SD-JWT is JWS-based.  It composes with
   SD-JWT rather than competing with it: a deployment already carrying
   SD-JWT credentials can treat an SDR as the same discipline applied to
   a different document class.

   The format is published with a machine-readable conformance corpus
   (golden vectors — a complete SDR and a reference projection — plus
   tamper cases that MUST fail at named checks) [SR-REPO] [SR-CORPUS].

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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.

   Envelope:  The signed part of the document: everything except proof
      and disclosures.

   Commitment:  The salted digest of one disclosure, carried in the
      envelope's sd member.

   Disclosure:  One {salt, path, value} object that reopens a
      commitment.

   Disclosure unit:  The granularity at which content may be disclosed:
      one of seven fixed claim units, or one evidence event
      (Section 3.2).

   Projection:  The envelope plus any subset of the disclosures — the
      form a relying party receives.

   Complete projection:  A projection in which every commitment is
      opened by a disclosure.

   Profile:  A named, published subset stating which units a projection
      disclosed for a given audience.  Profiles add no cryptography.

3.  The Document

   An SDR is a UTF-8 JSON [RFC8259] object.  The complete normative
   member catalog is the published SDR specification [SR-SDR]; this
   section summarizes the structure a verifier depends on.

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   {
     "@context":     ["https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/v2",
                      "urn:css:sdr:v0.1"],
     "type":         ["VerifiableCredential",
                      "SelectiveDisclosureReceipt"],
     "spec_version": "0.1",
     "issuer":       { "id": "urn:css:registry" },
     "validFrom":    "<RFC 3339 timestamp>",
     "credentialSubject": {
       "id":            "urn:uuid:<succession_id>",
       "succession_id": "<uuid>"
     },
     "sd": {
       "alg":      "sha-256",
       "claims":   [ "<hex digest>", ...exactly seven... ],
       "evidence": [ "<hex digest>", ...one per evidence event... ]
     },
     "proof": {
       "type":                "CSSEd25519Signature",
       "created":             "<RFC 3339 timestamp>",
       "verification_method": "<key_id>",
       "receipt_hash":        "<hex SHA-256 of the canonical bytes>",
       "signature":           "ed25519:<key_id>:<base64url(signature)>"
     },
     "disclosures": [
       { "salt":  "<64 lowercase hex characters>",
         "path":  "credentialSubject/legitimacy",
         "value": { ... } },
       { "salt":  "<64 lowercase hex characters>",
         "path":  "evidence/<event_id>",
         "value": { <event envelope, verbatim as recorded> } },
       ...
     ]
   }

   Only the subject pointer and validFrom (an [RFC3339] UTC instant)
   stay in clear: a receipt no one can address answers nothing, and the
   timestamp anchors when the attested state held.  Every other claim,
   and every evidence event, lives behind a commitment.  The document
   keeps the shape of the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model
   [VC-DATA-MODEL] as plain JSON, with the same caveats as the
   underlying receipt format [SR-ID].

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3.1.  Commitments

   The commitment digest of a disclosure is the lowercase hexadecimal
   SHA-256 of the *canonical bytes of the three-element array* [salt,
   path, value], serialized under the canonical form of Section 4.
   Salts are 32 bytes, carried as 64 lowercase hexadecimal characters,
   generated from a cryptographically secure random source, fresh per
   disclosure per issuance, and never reused — see Section 8.

   The commitment arrays in sd are sorted lexicographically and unique;
   the wire order carries no information. sd.alg is "sha-256", the sole
   registered value at version 0.1.

3.2.  The Version 0.1 Disclosure Units

   Disclosure granularity is pinned as data.  The claim units are
   exactly seven, carrying the underlying receipt's claim members
   verbatim [SR-ID]:

   credentialSubject/predecessor
   credentialSubject/successor
   credentialSubject/legitimacy
   credentialSubject/obligations_carried
   credentialSubject/commitments_carried
   credentialSubject/constitution
   credentialSubject/ledger_binding

   Every issued SDR commits to exactly these seven, so the claim-
   commitment count itself reveals nothing about the handoff.  The
   lineage arrays disclose as whole units, and commitments_carried is
   always a unit even when empty: under salted commitments the empty set
   is committed to, never omitted, or absence would be distinguishable
   from withholding.

   Each evidence event is one unit at path evidence/<event_id>, its
   value the event envelope verbatim as recorded.  The evidence set is
   exactly the set the equivalent plain receipt would carry.

   Finer granularity (per-element lineage disclosure) is a recorded
   evolution of the published specification, arriving only with a new
   spec_version; it changes the commitment-counting analysis of
   Section 8 and MUST NOT be improvised within version 0.1.

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4.  Canonicalization and Signatures

   The *canonical bytes* of an SDR are its JSON serialization with the
   proof *and* disclosures members absent, object member names sorted
   lexicographically, no insignificant whitespace, and no HTML escaping
   — coinciding with the JSON Canonicalization Scheme [RFC8785] for the
   format's value domain (no floating-point numbers).  Excluding
   disclosures from the signed content is the projection mechanism:
   dropping entries never touches the signature.

   The proof is the Succession Receipts proof unchanged [SR-ID]: hash-
   then-sign over the lowercase hexadecimal SHA-256 of the canonical
   bytes, ed25519 ([RFC8032]) as the sole registered algorithm at
   version 0.1, the canonical <alg>:<key_id>:base64url(signature-bytes)
   signature string, and proof.created outside the signed content.  The
   same canonical rules serialize the [salt, path, value] commitment
   input.

5.  Verification

   A verifier is given a projection and the issuer's public keys, pinned
   out of band.  Verification MUST perform, in order:

   1.  *Structure.* The @context, type, and spec_version members match
       Section 3 exactly; sd.alg is "sha-256"; sd.claims holds exactly
       seven digests and sd.evidence at least one, each 64 lowercase
       hexadecimal characters, sorted, unique; credentialSubject.id
       encodes succession_id; every disclosure is well-formed with a
       path from Section 3.2, and no path appears twice.

   2.  *Proof.* Recompute the canonical hash (Section 4) from the
       received document with proof and disclosures removed.  It MUST
       equal proof.receipt_hash, and proof.signature MUST verify against
       it under the key named by its key_id.

   3.  *Disclosure binding.* For every disclosure, recompute the
       commitment digest.  It MUST appear in sd.claims (claim-unit
       paths) or sd.evidence (evidence paths); no two disclosures may
       bind the same digest; an evidence disclosure's path MUST name its
       own event's event_id.

   4.  *Evidence integrity and authenticity.* Every disclosed evidence
       event's hash MUST recompute to its stored value under the event-
       hash rule of [SR-ID]; a present event signature MUST verify
       (absent signatures are reported, not fatal).

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   5.  *Disclosed-claim grounding.* The underlying receipt's claim-
       grounding rules [SR-ID] are applied over the disclosed subset,
       and each disclosed claim unit is assigned a status: *grounded*
       (every rule for it had its required evidence disclosed, and all
       passed), *disclosed* (at least one rule could not run for lack of
       disclosed evidence; nothing failed), or *undisclosed*. A
       disclosed claim *contradicted* by disclosed evidence is fatal —
       including the partial completeness checks a concealing holder
       would need to survive: a disclosed revocation absent from a
       disclosed revoked_authorities list, or a disclosed inheritance
       event for the disclosed successor absent from a disclosed lineage
       array, invalidates the projection.  The exact per-unit rule table
       is normative in the published specification [SR-SDR].

   6.  *Completeness escalation.* If every digest in both commitment
       arrays is opened, the projection is *complete*, and the verifier
       MUST reconstruct the full claim set and enforce the entirety of
       the underlying receipt's verification semantics [SR-ID] — both
       directions of the lineage and revocation rules, the constitution
       recount, and the ledger binding.  Any failure is fatal.  A
       complete projection is exactly as strong as the equivalent plain
       receipt.

   The pass yields a report: the envelope hash, each unit's status,
   disclosed and undisclosed evidence counts, signed and unsigned
   counts, and the complete flag.  What a relying party may _rely on_ is
   the per-unit status, never the mere fact of verification: a
   projection can verify while grounding almost nothing, and the report
   says so.

   A conforming verifier MUST accept every golden vector and MUST reject
   every tamper case of the published conformance corpus (tree sdr-v0.1)
   at the named check [SR-CORPUS].

6.  Projection Profiles

   A profile is a named, published statement of which units a projection
   disclosed for a given audience — an agreement about _what to
   disclose_, adding no cryptography.  Version 0.1 pins one reference
   profile:

   *regulator* — the projection for an auditor entitled to the
   governance facts but not the business surface.  Disclosed: the
   legitimacy, constitution, and ledger_binding claim units, plus the
   evidence events grounding them (the succession's completion and
   approval, the legitimacy determination, the genesis event, and the
   ratified amendments — all of whose payloads carry only opaque
   identifiers).  Withheld, but visibly committed: the parties, the

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   authority scope, the revocation bases, and the lineage identifiers.
   The regulator verifies that the named succession completed at
   validFrom, was approved under the named legitimacy evaluation at its
   determined state, and ran under the committed constitutional lineage
   — without receiving a single business-identifying string.

   Other profiles (counterparty, public existence proof) are sketched
   informatively in the published specification [SR-SDR]; a deployment
   tunes profiles to its own payload content.

7.  Versioning and Stability

   spec_version identifies the wire format.  Published versions are
   never mutated: format changes only ever add a new version with new
   golden vectors, and verifiers SHOULD continue to verify every
   published version.  Version 0.1 is the current draft on the format
   family's stated stability ladder toward a stable 1.0 [SR-SDR].

8.  Security Considerations

   The design inherits SD-JWT's salted-digest analysis [SD-JWT]; the
   considerations below restate the consequences for this document class
   and add the receipt-specific ones.

   *Forgery and splicing fail at the commitment.* Altering a disclosed
   value, salt, or path changes the commitment digest, which no longer
   appears in the signed arrays.  Commitment membership is per-envelope
   and salts are fresh per issuance, so a disclosure lifted from another
   receipt — even one committing an identical value — cannot bind.

   *Salt entropy is what protects withheld values.* Several claim values
   are low-entropy (booleans, two-value enums, short scope strings); an
   unsalted or salt-reused commitment would be trivially confirmable by
   dictionary.  Salts MUST be 32 bytes from a cryptographically secure
   random source, fresh per disclosure per issuance, never reused, and
   never derived from content.  Test vectors use published fixed salts;
   production issuance MUST NOT.

   *Projections of one SDR are mutually linkable, by design.* They share
   the envelope hash, the signature, and the digest sets.  Unlinkability
   across audiences requires issuing multiple salt-fresh SDRs over the
   same facts (batch issuance) — a recorded evolution, out of scope for
   version 0.1.  State this plainly to deploying parties; do not imply
   otherwise.

   *Commitment counts are public metadata.* The claim-commitment count
   is a constant seven and reveals nothing.  The evidence-commitment
   count reveals the evidence-set size (roughly, lineage volume).  Decoy

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   digests would hide it but are deliberately *not* part of version 0.1:
   an unopenable commitment would make the complete projection — the
   escalation gate this design's issuer-honesty story rests on —
   undecidable.  Any future decoy mechanism arrives with explicit
   signaling and its own version.

   *Possession is not entitlement.* Version 0.1 defines no holder
   binding: anyone holding a projection can forward it.  A recipient-
   bound presentation (in the style of SD-JWT key binding [SD-JWT]) is a
   recorded evolution.  Profiles are access decisions made at disclosure
   time; treat projections accordingly.

   *A lying issuer is caught at acceptance.* An issuer could commit to
   claims the record does not ground, counting on partial projections to
   hide it.  The complete-projection escalation is the countermeasure
   placed where it works: issuance MUST verify the complete projection
   before release, and a holder SHOULD verify it at acceptance — after
   which every projection the holder makes is a pure subset of a fully
   grounded, issuer-signed record.  A relying party receiving only a
   partial projection relies on the reported per-unit statuses, not on
   trust.

   *Key pinning is the trust root*, exactly as for the underlying
   receipts [SR-ID]: relying parties MUST obtain issuer keys through a
   channel they trust and SHOULD pin them.

9.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.  The signature-algorithm and
   sd.alg registries are internal to the format's spec-version ladder
   (Section 4), shared with Succession Receipts [SR-ID].

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [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>.

   [RFC3339]  Klyne, G. and C. Newman, "Date and Time on the Internet:
              Timestamps", RFC 3339, DOI 10.17487/RFC3339, July 2002,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339>.

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   [RFC8032]  Josefsson, S. and I. Liusvaara, "Edwards-Curve Digital
              Signature Algorithm (EdDSA)", RFC 8032,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8032, January 2017,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8032>.

   [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>.

   [RFC8259]  Bray, T., Ed., "The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data
              Interchange Format", STD 90, RFC 8259,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8259, December 2017,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8259>.

   [RFC8785]  Rundgren, A., Jordan, B., and S. Erdtman, "JSON
              Canonicalization Scheme (JCS)", RFC 8785,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8785, June 2020,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8785>.

10.2.  Informative References

   [SD-JWT]   Fett, D., Yasuda, K., and B. Campbell, "Selective
              Disclosure for JSON Web Tokens", RFC 9901,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC9901, November 2025,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9901>.

   [SD-JWT-VC]
              Terbu, O., Fett, D., and B. Campbell, "SD-JWT-based
              Verifiable Digital Credentials (SD-JWT VC)", Work in
              Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc-17, 6
              July 2026, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-
              ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc-17>.

   [SR-CORPUS]
              "Succession Receipts conformance corpus", 2026,
              <https://github.com/jsabes24/css-succession-
              receipts/tree/main/corpus>.

   [SR-ID]    "Succession Receipts: Portable Signed Evidence of
              Authority Succession Between Autonomous Agents", 2026,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sabey-succession-
              receipts/>.

   [SR-REPO]  "Succession Receipts: specifications and conformance
              corpus", 2026,
              <https://github.com/jsabes24/css-succession-receipts>.

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   [SR-SDR]   "CSS Selective-Disclosure Receipts (SDR)", 2026,
              <https://github.com/jsabes24/css-succession-
              receipts/blob/main/spec/selective-disclosure-receipts.md>.

   [VC-DATA-MODEL]
              "Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0", 2025,
              <https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/>.

Acknowledgments

   The disclosure mechanism follows the analysis of SD-JWT deliberately;
   the contribution here is its application to an existing plain-JSON
   receipt format without changing that format's proof discipline.  The
   format was extracted from a production authority-succession system of
   record; the conformance corpus packages its threat model — forging,
   splicing, concealing, and complicit-issuer re-signing attacks — as
   executable verification cases.

Author's Address

   Jaryn Mervin Sabey
   Continuity Laboratories
   Email: hello@continuitylaboratories.com

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