[Audit] Re: Question on AUDIT charter's use case scope

[nicholas <[e-mail]>]

Parisa, Henri,



Parisa, in your inline note you asked how I would define content-addressed, and I did not answer. In our records the identifier is the SHA-256 digest of a canonical serialisation of the record body (keys sorted, no insignificant whitespace, ASCII-escaped), and each published record states that rule beside the digest. Anyone holding the body can recompute the identifier, and a change to any byte breaks the match. The Ed25519 signature is verified over the same canonical bytes. Content addressing fixes which bytes a record is. It says nothing about whether the event it describes was the right event to record, which is your record-worthiness question.




That is why Henri's point about declared coverage matters to us. Our board marks a slot with no measurement as UNMEASURED instead of leaving it empty, because a missing record inside a declared boundary and one outside it look identical unless the boundary is written down. I would support the data models stating that boundary, and saying whether a decision-time record of an action that did not proceed is in scope.




Nicholas Templeman

CSOAI Ltd



Replying to [e-mail], parisa.foroughi=[e-mail] on September 14, 2026, 11:04 PM


From: [e-mail]

To: parisa.foroughi=[e-mail]

Cc: [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]

Date: September 14, 2026, 11:04 PM

Subject: Re: [Audit] Re: Question on AUDIT charter's use case scope


      
      
   
   

Parisa,



I agree that a declined request and a declined action are different cases. The efficiency concern attaches to the wider one.




Capturing an agent's internal reasoning and the options it never took is unbounded, and as you say those are mostly not explicit. I mean something narrower: a request that reached a policy boundary, had a rule applied, and was not forwarded. It is one explicit event with a decision attached, and the agent's reasoning does not have to be recoverable for it to be recorded.



Such a record only carries meaning inside a declared coverage boundary. Without one, a missing record means "not observed" and not "nothing happened", and that is why the data models should say where they stand.







    



Henri Sirkkavaara


Vaara - Accountable Autonomy

Built to see over the noise.

vaara.io (https://vaara.io)
Helsinki, Finland



    
            

        
            








        On Monday, September 14th, 2026 at 23:22, Parisa Foroughi <parisa.foroughi=[e-mail]> wrote:

        
            


Point taken on the dependency logic, and I agree with it that a declined action may fall out of scope. For me, a declined "request" certainly needs a record. A declined "action's" record and worth may depend on several factors. For example, It may not be efficient
 to capture and record all the internal reasoning and the decisions an agent decided not to make especially most times they are not even explicit. 









Still I agree with you that it will help with clarity if we know such action records are in or out of the scope.









Cheers,



Parisa 










From: Henri Sirkkavaara <[e-mail] (mailto:[e-mail])>

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Subject: Re: [Audit] Re: Question on AUDIT charter's use case scope 













 

	


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Parisa, Nicholas, 







A clause dropped out of my message on Sunday and took the sentence with it. What it should have read: defining action boundaries up front is genuinely harder and should not block the first deliverables,
 but recording that a boundary was applied is a separate and much smaller thing.







Parisa, your second question is the one I would put first. What makes an event record worthy is decided by the scope choice rather than settled after it. If the data models are written for correlation,
 record worthiness follows from having a downstream action to correlate against. A declined action has none, because nothing was forwarded. It falls out of scope by construction rather than by anyone deciding to exclude it.







So the ask stays narrow. The data models should say whether a record produced at decision time, describing an action that did not proceed, is in scope. If it is out, the charter saying so is worth
 more than silence, because people will build to these models expecting that case.









Henri Sirkkavaara


Vaara - Accountable Autonomy


Built to see over the noise.



vaara.io (https://vaara.io/)



Helsinki, Finland









On Monday, September 14th, 2026 at 14:15, Parisa Foroughi <parisa.foroughi=[e-mail] (mailto:parisa.foroughi=[e-mail])> wrote:






Hi Nicholas, 









Thanks for sharing your insights. Some minor comments are inline. 









Regards, 



Parisa 










From: nicholas <[e-mail] (mailto:[e-mail])>

Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2026 5:55 AM

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Subject: [Audit] Re: Question on AUDIT charter's use case scope












	



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Parisa,







Thanks for raising this — I think it is the right question to settle early.







My reading of the charter and supporting drafts is that the initial scope leans toward post-hoc accountability: reconstructing what happened, when, and under which commitment, from records produced across different trust domains.







Enforcement and admission accountability — defining action boundaries for autonomous agents — is a different and harder problem because intent and mandate must be specified up front. Tom's recent messages touch on this distinction. I would support naming
 post-hoc accountability as the primary scope and keeping enforcement as an explicit extension point, so the first deliverables are not blocked on the harder problem.








PF: Points taken. Indeed starting with a focused scope that is achievable is a better strategic decision. 








On the record question, Tom Sato's ten-point list is a useful framework. Our current pattern is a content-addressed, signed card (Ed25519 and SHA-256) that names its subject, method, measurement, and the commitment under which it was produced. The signing
 key is held by infrastructure through GitHub Actions OIDC, rather than by the agent. A periodic corpus root is signed, witnessed in Sigstore Rekor, and timestamped through OpenTimestamps; Bitcoin confirmation is pending. XRPL memo anchoring is designed but
 is not yet live. Verification therefore depends on the published card, public key, root manifest, and available transparency receipts, with those limits stated explicitly.








PF: Also agree that Tom's question list is a good start, and maybe even almost there when it comes to right questions to ask. However, that list applies to
what should go in a record/associated with a record for it to be "audit-friendly". Another orthogonal question is what should trigger generation of record and  I don't mean what requests should trigger it. I mean,
what events/matters are record worthy? In other words, when you mention content-addressed how would you define it?







The current public root indexes 169 leaves. The GSPC framework defines 22 axes, and the board exposes measured, untested, tied, and uncheckable states rather than treating every leaf as a completed axis result.







The minimum unit of auditability we have found useful is a content-addressed, signed record that identifies subject, method, measurement, and the commitment under which it was produced, so another party can verify the available evidence without trusting
 the producer's assertion.







PF: noted. Thanks for sharing.


Happy to share implementation detail with the WG once it is chartered.







Best,


Nicholas







Nicholas Templeman


CSOAI Ltd (UK 16939677)


IETF SCITT contributor (draft-templeman-scitt-framing-space-00)