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

[Henri Sirkkavaara <[e-mail]>]

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.ioHelsinki, Finland

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

> Hi Nicholas,
>
> Thanks for sharing your insights. Some minor comments are inline.
>
> Regards,
> Parisa
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: nicholas <[e-mail]>
> Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2026 5:55 AM
> To: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
> 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)