[saag] Re: Relay Attacks in Intra-handshake Attestation for Confidential Agentic AI Systems

[Muhammad Usama Sardar <[e-mail]>]

Hi Ekr,

Thank you for clarification on the second point. I'd like to ensure I'm 
following your reasoning correctly on the first one.

On 04.03.26 23:54, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2026 at 1:49 PM Muhammad Usama Sardar 
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>     On 04.03.26 19:02, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>>     On Wed, Mar 4, 2026 at 9:59 AM Muhammad Usama Sardar
>>     <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>         [ Already shared at relevant lists like SEAT, RATS, TLS,
>>         UFMRG; sharing here for wider opinion/review ]
>>
>>     Please stop doing reposting this everywhere.
>     I believe there are folks here who are not on other lists, and
>     vice versa. I would very much value their perspective. There was a
>     disclaimer upfront which folks on these list could safely ignore.
>
>
> The whole purpose of having lists is so that people can subscribe to one
> stream of messages and not others. Cross-posting to a bunch of
> semi-irrelevant lists -- let alone reposting to them -- subverts this
> purpose. The disclaimer doesn't make it better.

Sorry, I don't fully understand your point. Could you please re-phrase 
to be more specific to my post/work rather than general comments? 
Specifically, are you claiming that the work I posted is 
"semi-irrelevant" to this list? or to other lists? Please clarify.

For each list, there is a specific context and for this list, in meeting 
124, I mentioned on-mic about the wish to have a research group (RG) on 
confidential AI in IRTF and this work is planting the seed for that. As 
I mentioned, I envision that potential RG to be very security-focused 
and SAAG seems to be the right place to bootstrap some discussions and 
to gather more potential proponents for the upcoming side meeting.

I believe a serious research effort takes 9-12 months to mature, and to 
the best of my memory, I believe I have never [*] posted any pre-mature 
results anywhere in the IETF/IRTF; so cross-posting and even reposting 
after this period is not excessive to me, given the multi-disciplinary 
nature of the work and the aim to create a multi-disciplinary RG, 
building on top of SEAT, RATS and TLS and collaborating with UFMRG.

I actually have a draft for SAAG on the gap analysis, but due to some 
other urgent work, I couldn't make it to this cutoff but that is the 
intended path for this work. I'll share that when I have it in a 
presentable form.

You are a very experienced IETF contributor and I very much value your 
opinion. So I sincerely hope we do a technical discussion over the post 
that I can take into account for drafting a proposed charter of the 
potential RG, so that the potential RG is not a paper-making machine, 
rather actually contributes to the goals of the IETF. However, if I am 
in serious breach of this mailing list etiquette (I'm fairly new here), 
please let me know, and I'll surely stop. In that case, please accept my 
sincere apologies in advance.

Best regards,

-Usama

[*] Whenever I did post intuition and/or preliminary work, I believe it 
was with an explicit warning with words like "intuition" or 
"work-in-progress" not to put much weight in this.