draft-wang-rats-distributed-remote-attestation
Distributed Remote Attestation
In many deployments, remote attestation is performed within separate
administrative and trust domains. Each domain typically operates its
own management plane and a Remote Attestation Service (RAS) to obtain
verifier inputs (e.g., endorsement material and reference values) and
produce attestation results. At scale, cross-domain scenarios face
two recurring challenges: (1) enabling policy-controlled transparency
so that verifiers or relying parties in one domain can discover and
retrieve selected attestation artifacts from other domains; and (2)
supporting many-to-many distribution and reuse of verifier inputs and
verifier outputs without requiring point-to-point integrations.
This document describes Distributed Remote Attestation (DRA) patterns
that use a shared publication channel for selected artifacts with
provenance and access control in mind. A Distributed Ledger (DL) is
discussed as one concrete instantiation of such a publication
channel, including an option to host verification logic on the DL.
The described patterns are intended to complement existing RATS
procedures and conceptual messages, and can be realized by other
tamper-evident publication channels with comparable properties.