Re: [Rats] 802.1AR device identity

["Smith, Ned" <[e-mail]>]

It is reasonable, in the context of onboarding, where the owner isn’t a supply chain entity, but the network owner who is going to deploy / manage the device. Onboarding might involve separately evaluating the supply chain risk and any ‘owner’ that might be a supplier from onboarding processes that take a clean room approach that wipe clean / reset to mfg defaults.

An mfg IDevID design might be such that tampering by supply chain ‘owners’ would be detected and hence trusting them isn’t really necessary. The end user / customer as ‘owner’ might only care about trusting the IDevID mfg or only trusting him/her self.

From: Russ Housley <[e-mail]>
Date: Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 10:31 AM
To: Eliot Lear <lear=[e-mail]>
Cc: Guy Fedorkow <[e-mail]>, "Smith, Ned" <[e-mail]>, Henk Berkholz <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>, Laurence Lundblade <[e-mail]>, Ira McDonald <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [Rats] 802.1AR device identity




On Apr 18, 2021, at 9:51 AM, Eliot Lear <lear=[e-mail]<mailto:lear=[e-mail]>> wrote:

Signed PGP part
Sorry for the delayed response:


On 2 Apr 2021, at 19:05, Guy Fedorkow <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:

Hi Laurence,
  I agree that IDevID is intended to persist through the device’s lifetime, while LDevID is meant to represent the current owner.

Yes, that was the original intent, and even the current intent.  And while that is necessary, it may not be sufficient for long supply chains where ownership passes from one to another.  The LDevID is an owner-assigned name, and so the question is this: when an owner goes to transfer, does it need to use the IDevID again or should it use the LDevID?  There are benefits and drawbacks to both, but if the LDevID is used, then it is used as the IDevID would have been as part of that transfer.  The nice thing about FDO is that it keeps an entire record of these sorts of transfers.

I think it depends on whether the new owner trusts the issuer of the LDevID.  If so, then leveraging the existing LDevID may be straightforward.  If the new owner does not trust the issuer of the LDevID, then resetting the device to the factory default settings, which would include the IDevID, makes a lot of sense.

Russ