Privacy Preserving Verifiable Geofencing with Residency Proofs for Sovereign Workloads

Modern cloud and distributed computing rely heavily on software-only identities and bearer tokens that are easily stolen, replayed, or used from unauthorized locations. Furthermore, traditional methods of location verification — such as IP-address-based geolocation — are easily spoofed via VPNs or proxies and significantly compromise infrastructure security and privacy for sovereign workloads and high- assurance environments. This document defines the *Verifiable Geofencing Attestation Profile (V-GAP)*, a profile of the RATS Architecture {{!RFC9334}}, that solves these challenges through hardware-rooted cryptographic verifiability. A host machine runs a Workload Identity Agent for managing the workload identities on that platform. This profile replaces implicit trust and spoofable indicators with cryptographically verifiable hardware-rooted Evidence of integrity and location for this agent. Critically, this framework prioritizes location privacy by utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), allowing a workload to prove it is within a compliant zone without disclosing precise coordinates. By binding software identities to persistent silicon identities and verified physical residency, V-GAP establishes a silicon-to-workload chain of trust. It ensures that sensitive operations are only performed by authorized workloads running on untampered hardware in cryptographically verified, privacy-preserving geographic boundaries, fulfilling the high-assurance requirements of the WIMSE Architecture {{!I-D.ietf-wimse-architecture}}.