[nasr] Re: [saag] Re: Re: Re: NASR BOF Follow-Up

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 4:32 AM Meiling Chen
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Hi Watson,
> I'm confused about "nontrivial semantic claims", can you give an example to explain?
>
> For example, if the operator's customer requires every node to support TEE, then only need to choose from nodes that have TEE functionality. It is not necessary to determine whether the router supports TEE from each configuration and operation directive, and to ensure the authenticity of the claims supporting TEE functionality, that's in the scope of RATS.

Correct. Some claims are easy to verify. Most aren't. Statements that
"the router supports X" aren't really interesting. Statements that
"this configuration will never pass your traffic over a bad link" are,
but are a lot harder to show.

>
> Best,
> Meiling
>
> From: Watson Ladd
> Date: 2025-04-19 02:22
> To: Henk Birkholz
> CC: Liuchunchi(Peter); Eric Rescorla; Toerless Eckert; [e-mail]; IETF SAAG; Luigi Iannone
> Subject: [nasr] Re: [saag] Re: Re: Re: NASR BOF Follow-Up
> Dear Henk,
>
> Your response was very detailed I think helped me at least, understand
> the core issue of our disagreement. If I might take some liberties in
> summarizing, it sounds like what you want is to provide additional
> scaffolding from NASR to enable collection of evidence, and maybe some
> standardized ways to represent the evidence, from a chain of routers
> that it can be proved some packets transit. The evidence attests to
> syntactic properties of the code and configuration at a point in time,
> maybe with some kind of history mechanism to understand it.
>
> However, the properties being claimed are nontrivial semantic claims
> dependent on the configuration and the software that uses this
> configuration to route packets. There's a big gap here, and I don't
> believe it has been solved. To the extent that NASR needs these to be
> solved to provide certain things, it won't be able to provide them,
> and I think that undermines a lot of the presented rationale.
>
> Sincerely,
> Watson Ladd
>



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