| Internet-Draft | Mission Audit Transparency | August 2026 |
| McGuinness | Expires 10 February 2027 | [Page] |
Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 and its companions produce many evidence records: the approval event, lifecycle transitions, consent evidence, runtime decision and execution evidence, and further evidence types profiles define. Each is signed, but signed is not the same as tamper-evident, append-only, or independently verifiable: a holder of the signing key can still backdate, drop, or reorder records, and a cross-domain party cannot confirm what was recorded without trusting the issuer's own logs. This document defines an optional Mission Audit Transparency profile. It registers Mission evidence into a SCITT Transparency Service as Signed Statements, with the Mission as the statement subject so a Mission's records form one coherent, append-only feed, and binds the resulting Receipt back so any party, in any domain, can verify offline that a record was registered and not altered. To keep sensitive task data out of the log, statements commit to the evidence by hash rather than carrying it.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://mcguinness.github.io/mission-bound-authorization/draft-mcguinness-mission-audit.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcguinness-mission-audit/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/mcguinness/mission-bound-authorization.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶
This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 February 2027.¶
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (the "issuance profile") and its companions record evidence at every governance and enforcement point. The evidence is signed, which makes a single record attributable and tamper-evident in isolation. It does not make the record set as a whole trustworthy: the party that holds the signing key can backdate a record, omit an inconvenient one, or present different histories to different auditors, and nothing a relying party holds detects it. A cross-domain auditor is worse off still, with only the issuer's assertion that its logs are complete.¶
This document closes that gap by profiling the SCITT architecture [RFC9943] (the "transparency substrate"). A Mission evidence record is registered with a Transparency Service as a Signed Statement; the service appends it to an append-only log and returns a Receipt proving inclusion. The Signed Statement plus its Receipt is a Transparent Statement that any party can verify offline: the record was registered, at a committed time, and is included in a signed log tree head. Detecting whether the service later drops or reorders a record, or shows different auditors different heads, rests on trusting that single service or on registering with more than one (Section 11, Section 13). The Mission is the statement subject, so all of a Mission's evidence shares one subject and forms one feed an auditor can assemble and replay as a single narrative (Section 6.6).¶
This adds transparency to evidence the suite already defines; it defines no new evidence object. It is optional, and what it proves is bounded: transparency makes misbehavior detectable and attributable, it does not make a dishonest issuer honest (Section 11).¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Any evidence record the suite defines, including the approval event, lifecycle transitions, consent evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]), and runtime decision and execution evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]).¶
This document is optional. A deployment that retains evidence without a Transparency Service is fully conformant to the issuance profile and its companions and is unaffected by this document. It places no new requirement on them and defines no new evidence; it registers the records they already produce.¶
A deployment claims this profile only when it registers Mission evidence with a Transparency Service.¶
The transparency substrate this profile builds on is ratified: it depends normatively on the SCITT architecture [RFC9943], a published standard. Its hash commitment uses the COSE hash-envelope headers ([I-D.draft-ietf-cose-hash-envelope]), approved and in the RFC Editor queue. The profile itself is newer than the substrate and less exercised in deployment, so an implementer treats its interfaces as still settling and validates them against real audits before relying on them. The signed evidence the suite produces without a Transparency Service ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) does not depend on this profile.¶
This document depends normatively on the issuance profile and the transparency substrate, and is not implementable alone. It reuses:¶
the issuance profile's mission claim and integrity anchors;¶
the evidence objects defined across the suite; and¶
the transparency substrate's Signed Statement, Receipt, Transparent Statement, and subject (feed) constructs and COSE_Sign1 [RFC9052] format.¶
It uses Mission, Mission Issuer, and the evidence objects as the suite defines them, and Transparency Service, Signed Statement, Receipt, and Transparent Statement as the transparency substrate defines them.¶
The transparency substrate's Receipt, the Transparency Service's proof of inclusion, is distinct from the runtime profile's Mission Receipt, portable evidence of an action taken under a Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]); this document uses Receipt in the SCITT sense only. Registering a Mission Receipt's underlying evidence on the Mission's feed provides tamper-evident ordering and inclusion; the receipt-chaining alternative, each Mission Receipt binding its predecessor's digest, is for a deployment without a Transparency Service.¶
This profile is defined against the Mission model rather than against OAuth 2.0 mechanics. It consumes these substrate primitives:¶
the Mission identifier and issuer, from which the statement subject is constructed;¶
the evidence types and their canonical bytes;¶
the integrity-anchor envelope;¶
each producer's published key material; and¶
the audit horizon, the retention window the registered evidence must survive.¶
The issuance profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] is this version's normative substrate. Evidence produced under another Mission substrate registers and verifies the same way once its types and canonical bytes are defined as in the evidence-type table (Section 6.3).¶
A producer of Mission evidence (the Mission Issuer, a Policy Decision Point, a harness, or another component the deployment trusts to record) MAY register a record with a Transparency Service as a Signed Statement ([RFC9943]). The Signed Statement's protected header carries, in its CWT Claims:¶
iss: the producing component's issuer identifier, bound to the key
the record is signed with; and¶
A Signed Statement MUST commit to the evidence by hash rather than carry
the evidence itself, so sensitive task data stays out of the log
(Section 14). The commitment uses the COSE hash-envelope
mechanism [I-D.draft-ietf-cose-hash-envelope]: the COSE_Sign1 payload
is the hash of the evidence, carried inline, and the protected header
signals how the hash was produced. The payload is not detached, and it
is not the sha-256:... display string an integrity anchor uses
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); it is the digest bytes
themselves.¶
The committed value is the SHA-256 [RFC6234] digest of the evidence bytes that Section 6.3 fixes for the evidence type. For an object that is already signed, those bytes are the retained object as issued, hashed as-is; for an object this profile canonicalizes, they are its JCS canonical bytes. The protected header carries:¶
payload-hash-alg (label 258): the COSE algorithm of the hash, -16
for SHA-256 [I-D.draft-ietf-cose-hash-envelope]; and¶
payload-preimage-content-type (label 259): the media type of the evidence
that was hashed, from Section 6.3.¶
The log then proves a specific record was registered at a time; the evidence is retrieved separately, under access control, and its canonical bytes are rehashed and checked against the committed digest (Section 9).¶
Several registrable evidence types, defined across the runtime,
AuthZEN, harness, and containment profiles, record an enforcement or
issuer decision under a shared shape: a reference to the Mission the
record concerns, an emitter object naming the component that
produced it (id, a string; role, one of pdp, pep, executor,
harness, egress, or issuer), and, where the defining profile
fixes it, an entry_digest naming the Authority Set entry the record
concerns ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]). Two further
members carry correlation a record MAY need: hop_reference,
attributing a record to the continuation hop that authorized it,
defined as a coordinated Decision Evidence member by the AuthZEN
binding ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]), and
scope_statement_digest, binding a record to the published
Enforcement Scope Statement in effect when it was made, defined by the
harness profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]).¶
This is a naming convention this document names once, not a wire
object every evidence type carries verbatim. Each type's defining
profile fixes the concrete form of the Mission reference (a nested
mission object or a flat mission_id/issuer pair), its own record
identifier, and its own timestamp member, and adds its own
kind-specific members on top; no member named here is required across
every type, and a defining profile states which of them it carries and
whether each is required, optional, or absent for that type.¶
The shared naming does not weaken, and is not a substitute for, the
per-type separation Section 6.3 fixes. Each evidence type keeps
its own registered payload-preimage-content-type or JWS typ, and a
signature or hash commitment produced over one type's canonical bytes
remains verifiable only as that type: domain separation comes from the
signed content-type or typ value (Section 6.1), never from
members a record happens to share with another type. A relying party
that recognizes these member names by convention still MUST check a
record's registered type identifier against the exact type it expects
before treating the record as that type (Section 6.4).¶
Each registrable evidence type fixes the exact bytes that are hashed,
the media type carried in payload-preimage-content-type, and the producer
authoritative for it. A producer MUST commit to the canonical bytes
named here. A relying party MUST verify the producer is
authoritative for the type (Section 6.4) before treating a
record as part of the Mission's feed.¶
| Evidence type | Canonical bytes (hashed) | payload-preimage-content-type | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approval event | Mission record at creation, state excluded, canonicalized |
application/mission-approval-record+json
|
issuer
|
| Lifecycle transition | Signals SET as issued; else Section 6.3.1 (JCS) |
application/secevent+jwt, else application/mission-lifecycle-transition+json
|
issuer
|
| Derivation record | Section 6.3.2 (JCS) |
application/mission-derivation-record+json
|
issuer
|
| Consent evidence | retained signed object, as issued |
application/mission-consent-evidence+json
|
issuer
|
| Decision evidence | Decision Evidence object, as issued |
application/mission-decision-evidence+json
|
PDP key |
| Execution evidence | Execution Evidence object, as issued |
application/mission-execution-evidence+json
|
PEP key |
| Refusal Record | Refusal Record object, as issued |
application/mission-refusal-record+json
|
PEP key |
| Mission Mandate | JWS Compact Serialization, as issued |
application/mission-mandate+jwt
|
issuer
|
| Child Evidence | Child Evidence object (JCS), as the child-delegation profile fixes |
application/mission-child-evidence+json
|
issuer
|
| Discovery Evidence | Discovery Evidence object (JCS), as the discovery profile fixes |
application/mission-discovery-evidence+json
|
issuer
|
| Harness Evidence | Harness Evidence object (JCS), as the harness profile fixes |
application/mission-harness-evidence+json
|
harness key |
| Erasure record | Section 6.3.3 (JCS) |
application/mission-erasure-record+json
|
producer of the erased record's type |
The table is extensible by specification: a profile MAY define an
additional evidence type by fixing its canonical bytes, its
payload-preimage-content-type, and its authoritative producer, as the
Mandate profile does for the Mission Mandate
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]). A relying party admits an
extension type it implements; it ignores records of a type it does
not implement, and they are not audit failures.¶
The producer identifiers are principals the suite already names. For
every record whose producer is the Mission issuer, the Signed
Statement's iss MUST equal that issuer
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The PDP and PEP keys are those
in the deployment-published key sets the runtime and AuthZEN profiles
require ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime],
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]).¶
The approval event, the lifecycle-transition object, and the derivation record are canonicalized under the issuance profile's canonicalization rules ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); an already-signed object (the consent, decision, execution, and refusal evidence, the Signals SET, and the Mandate) is hashed as issued, not re-canonicalized.¶
The media types and type identifiers are defined as follows:¶
the approval-event, lifecycle-transition, and derivation-record media types are defined by this profile (Section 15);¶
the consent, decision, execution, and refusal evidence types are registered by the profiles that define those objects ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]);¶
the Signals SET media type by the Signals profile it is carried in ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]);¶
the Mandate media type by the Mandate profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]);¶
the Child Evidence canonical bytes and type identifier by the child-delegation profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]); and¶
the Discovery Evidence canonical bytes and type identifier by the discovery profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-discovery]).¶
The approval event's canonical bytes are the whole Mission record at
creation with state excluded, canonicalized (Section 6.3):
every committed member is included, including members companion
profiles add to the record under its extensibility rules, so the
commitment covers the record as approved and not a fixed subset. These
bytes carry no typ/iss integrity-anchor envelope, unlike the
derivation record's entries_digest and token_digest
(Section 6.3.2); domain separation instead comes from the
signed payload-preimage-content-type in the COSE hash-envelope
protected header (Section 6.1), which binds the committed hash
to application/mission-approval-record+json and keeps a digest of one
evidence type from being read as another.¶
Each companion-defined row binds only a deployment that produces that evidence, so the reference is consulted only where the profile is adopted. A row whose defining profile is Experimental (the Discovery Evidence row) stays on that profile's maturity: this document keeps that reference informative, and a deployment not running the Experimental profile omits the row. A deployment that does not run the Signals profile commits lifecycle transitions as the transition object (Section 6.3.1) instead of the Signals SET.¶
A Child Evidence record registers on the Parent Mission's feed: the
sub is the parent's (Section 8), its producer is the issuer, and
the child Mission's id inside the evidence makes the delegation
navigable from parent to child.¶
A deployment that does not run the Signals profile commits a lifecycle transition as a minimal JSON object with these members, JCS-canonicalized [RFC8785]:¶
mission_id (string, required): the Mission id.¶
issuer (string, required): the Mission issuer.¶
state (string, required): the new lifecycle state.¶
prior_state (string, optional): the state immediately before the
transition.¶
transitioned_at (string, required): an RFC 3339 [RFC3339]
date-time at which the transition was committed.¶
salt (string, required): a random salt of at least 128 bits,
base64url-encoded, retained with the evidence. The object's other
members are drawn from an enumerable space, so an unsalted
commitment is confirmable by dictionary
(Section 14).¶
Its media type is application/mission-lifecycle-transition+json
(Section 15).¶
A minimal transition object recording the revocation of Mission
msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-; the salt is a fixed
illustrative 16-byte value, where a producer generates a fresh random
one per record:¶
{
"mission_id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"salt": "q7hJ2mXv9pTzR4kW5nB8dQ",
"state": "revoked",
"transitioned_at": "2026-11-02T08:30:00Z"
}
¶
Its JCS canonical bytes (one line; breaks are for display only):¶
{"issuer":"https://as.example.com","mission_id":"msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv
4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-","salt":"q7hJ2mXv9pTzR4kW5nB8dQ","state":"revo
ked","transitioned_at":"2026-11-02T08:30:00Z"}
¶
The committed digest is the SHA-256 of those bytes; its base64url
form is SD3SCb7vm3b_Ivsm19ENQAGAv7pjLS-mNWGcaXqslmc. The Signed
Statement carries the digest bytes inline as its payload, with this
protected header (Section 6.1, Section 8):¶
{
/ alg / 1: -7, / ES256 /
/ payload-hash-alg / 258: -16, / SHA-256 /
/ payload-preimage-content-type / 259:
"application/mission-lifecycle-transition+json",
/ kid / 4: h'61732d6b65792d323032362d7133',
/ CWT Claims / 15: {
/ iss / 1: "https://as.example.com",
/ sub / 2: "https://as.example.com/missions/
msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-"
}
}
¶
The family's evidence runs from the approval to the enforced action,
but the derivation event between them, the issuer issuing a token
under the Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), is
otherwise visible only in Authorization Server logs no profile
mandates. A derivation record closes that gap: it commits which token
was issued, to which audience, carrying which entries, under which
Mission.¶
A derivation record is a JSON object with these members, JCS-canonicalized [RFC8785]:¶
mission_id (string, required): the Mission id.¶
issuer (string, required): the Mission issuer.¶
token_digest (string, required): a digest in the issuance
profile's encoded form ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]),
over the UTF-8 bytes of the issued token's JWS Compact
Serialization, or of the token's jti where the deployment retains
no token bytes.¶
token_digest_kind (string, required): which preimage
token_digest was taken over, so a verifier need not guess: jws
for the token's JWS Compact Serialization, or jti for the token's
jti.¶
aud (string, required): the audience the token was issued for.¶
entries_digest (string, required): the integrity-anchor envelope
digest ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) over the issued
authorization_details array, with typ
mission-derivation-entries and iss the issuer.¶
actor (string, optional): the delegate's sub, present when the
derivation was a delegation.¶
issued_at (string, required): an RFC 3339 [RFC3339] date-time at
which the token was issued.¶
Its media type is application/mission-derivation-record+json
(Section 15), and its authoritative producer is the issuer: the Signed
Statement's iss MUST equal the Mission issuer
(Section 6.3).¶
For Mission msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-, the Mission Issuer issues
a token for audience https://erp.example.com, narrowed to the write
entry, with jti at_5v9Kq2mR7xW4nP8sL1zT6. The issued
authorization_details:¶
[
{ "type": "mission_resource_access",
"resource": "https://erp.example.com",
"actions": ["journal-entries.write"],
"constraints":
{ "max_amount": { "amount": "500.00", "currency": "USD" } } }
]
¶
entries_digest is the integrity-anchor envelope digest over that
array with typ mission-derivation-entries and iss
https://as.example.com; token_digest is over the UTF-8 bytes of
the jti, so token_digest_kind is jti. The derivation was not a
delegation, so actor is absent. The record:¶
{
"mission_id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"token_digest":
"sha-256:V1Wbh4Z3wK39B_YmzHlvkGr7hEA1rUoJMuj00y0q-eE",
"token_digest_kind": "jti",
"aud": "https://erp.example.com",
"entries_digest":
"sha-256:Hilv4npLEWlcp2y5z7xcACgXxRhx-LO6dqs5AX0xL8o",
"issued_at": "2026-10-15T14:32:12Z"
}
¶
Its JCS canonical bytes (one line; breaks are for display only):¶
{"aud":"https://erp.example.com","entries_digest":"sha-256:Hilv4np
LEWlcp2y5z7xcACgXxRhx-LO6dqs5AX0xL8o","issued_at":"2026-10-15T14:3
2:12Z","issuer":"https://as.example.com","mission_id":"msn_8RfX2Lq
v9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-","token_digest":"sha-256:V1Wbh4Z3wK39B_Y
mzHlvkGr7hEA1rUoJMuj00y0q-eE","token_digest_kind":"jti"}
¶
The committed digest is the SHA-256 of those bytes; its base64url
form is ilGnfpu7hz4kMZeqXWuxwNi0i_fO2vzjWGOY_i9yt4s. The Signed
Statement carries the digest bytes inline as its payload, with
payload-preimage-content-type application/mission-derivation-record+json
and the same iss and sub as Section 6.3.1.1.¶
When retained evidence is destroyed inside its retention window, under a data-subject request or a retention limit, the erasure itself is registered, so the resulting audit failure is explained on the feed rather than indistinguishable from convenient loss (Section 14). The canonical bytes are the JCS serialization of a JSON object with:¶
erased (string, required): the committed digest, from the Signed
Statement's payload, of the record whose evidence was erased.¶
basis (string, required): the erasure basis:
data_subject_request, retention_limit, or a deployment-defined
value.¶
erased_at (string, required): an RFC 3339 [RFC3339] date-time.¶
salt (string, required): a random salt of at least 128 bits,
base64url encoded, per the enumerable-shape rule of
Section 14.¶
The record's producer is the authoritative producer of the erased record's type, and it registers on the same Mission feed. A relying party that finds an erasure record covering an unretrievable commitment treats the audit failure as explained (recorded-basis erasure, still not content-verified); an unexplained gap, in a deployment that registers erasures, remains worth recording (Section 9.1).¶
Each evidence type has one authoritative producer (Section 6.3).
A relying party MUST verify that a record's iss is the authoritative
producer for the record's type before treating the record as part of the
Mission's feed; a record from any other producer is not part of the
feed, whatever its sub.¶
The deployment's Transparency Service registration policy SHOULD restrict who may register Signed Statements for a Mission subject to those authoritative producers, so the log does not accumulate records from components that are not entitled to write to a Mission's feed.¶
A relying party discovers a producer's key by the producer's role. The
issuer's key is resolved through its published key material:¶
the Authorization Server's metadata jwks_uri in the OAuth binding
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]);¶
the Mission Authority Server's discovery jwks_uri in the
standalone binding
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]); or¶
the AAuth Person Server's existing jwks_uri in the AAuth binding
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]).¶
A PDP, PEP, or harness key is resolved through the deployment-published key sets the runtime and AuthZEN profiles require ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime], [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]); the harness profile requires the same publication of a harness that registers its evidence ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]).¶
Registration is asynchronous to the events it records. A producer MUST NOT block approval, issuance, or a lifecycle transition on a Transparency Service being reachable or on a Receipt being returned; the governed operation proceeds and the record is registered out of band.¶
A conforming deployment MUST register each record within a documented time bound. It MUST record its registration backlog, so a gap between an event and its registration is visible rather than silent. The deployment publishes, with its registration schedule, in its Mission Deployment Profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]):¶
This mirrors the runtime profile's orphaned-evidence obligations ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]).¶
A record registered late is transparent only from its registration time: the Receipt proves inclusion from when the log received the Signed Statement, not from when the event occurred. A deployment that needs the event time itself attested relies on the timestamps the evidence carries, which the record's hash commits.¶
The transparency substrate registers Signed Statements and resolves a Receipt by its entry identifier; the SCITT reference APIs [I-D.draft-ietf-scitt-scrapi] give a concrete interface for registration, Receipt resolution, and Transparency Service key discovery where a deployment runs them. Neither the substrate nor those APIs defines a query that enumerates a subject's whole feed.¶
A deployment that wants an auditor to retrieve all of a Mission's
records by sub provides that enumeration itself, out of band, over
the records it registered; this profile fixes the sub so those
records share one correlator (Section 8), not a standardized feed
query.¶
Out of band is not undocumented. A deployment claiming this profile MUST document its feed-enumeration mechanism:¶
how an authorized auditor retrieves every record registered for a
sub;¶
in what order;¶
with what completeness relative to Section 6.7; and¶
under what auditor authentication.¶
The mechanism is deployment-chosen (a SCRAPI extension, a log export, a query surface over retained Transparent Statements); an undocumented one leaves the feed assembled only by the deployment itself, which is the trust this profile exists to remove.¶
A deployment claiming this profile MUST register at least the governance-critical records: the approval event and every Mission lifecycle transition. It SHOULD also register the runtime decision and execution evidence for the action classes it enforces, so the action trail is transparent and not only the governance trail.¶
A Mission Issuer deploying this profile SHOULD register a derivation record (Section 6.3.2) for each derivation event. The derivation is where approval becomes an issued token, and the family's evidence otherwise leaves that step to Authorization Server logs no profile mandates; registering it closes the approval-to-action gap.¶
This section is non-normative reference-architecture guidance. It describes how a deployment builds an activity view across evidence its separate producers retain; it defines no wire member and imposes no requirement of this profile.¶
Registration (Section 6) commits evidence by hash to one Mission-keyed transparency feed (Section 8); it does not itself join records into a timeline. Independently of registration, evidence is producer-retained (each PDP, PEP, executor, egress gate, harness, and the Mission Issuer keeps its own store, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]), and a deployment builds a per-Mission activity view by joining those retained records at query time, over correlation members the evidence conventions already carry:¶
mission_id, or the nested Mission reference an object carries: the
join's outer key, present on every record.¶
event_id: correlates a containment-plane ingestion decision to the
Containment Evidence it produced when the outcome was applied
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]).¶
hop_reference: correlates an action's evidence to the continuation
hop that authorized it (Section 6.2).¶
entry_digest: correlates records across producers and decisions
that concern the same Authority Set entry.¶
trace_id: a deployment-supplied telemetry correlation identifier
threading every record one task run produced, when the deployment's
evidence-emitting components share one. This document does not
define its form or require it.¶
Each key joins only where the producing profile's evidence carries it:
a record with no hop_reference was not taken under a continuation,
and Containment Evidence carries no trace_id.¶
A Mission's lineage members thread a whole task-run graph, one Mission
at a time, into a tree: the parent member a Child Mission's record
carries ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]), the
template member a template-dispatched Mission carries
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-template]), and the
predecessor member an expansion successor carries
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]). A template's
dispatched instances, a dispatched Mission's Child Missions, and the
continuation hops carried on their evidence, form the branches; an
expansion successor's predecessor is lineage metadata pointing back
to the Mission it succeeds, not a branch of the same run, because a
successor's authority comes only from its own approval
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]).¶
A reference realization of this guidance is a console activity log: a read-model view joining Decision Evidence, Execution Evidence, Refusal Records, egress evidence, issuer ingestion records, and Containment Evidence across their producers into a per-Mission task-run timeline, by the keys and the lineage tree above, without registering, moving, or duplicating any producer's evidence of record.¶
The sub of every Signed Statement about a Mission is a stable
identifier of that Mission, derived from the mission claim's issuer
and id. All evidence about one Mission shares one sub and forms one
Transparency Service feed. Where the deployment provides feed retrieval
(Section 6.6), an auditor collects a Mission's registered evidence
by that sub, ordered and append-only within what the retrieval
returns.¶
That retrieval is out-of-band enumeration the deployment provides (Section 6.6), not a standardized subject query the substrate defines: the substrate's non-equivocation guarantee binds the log and its Receipts, not the completeness of an enumeration the audited deployment itself assembles. A deployment can therefore present different auditors different subject listings, and such a per-auditor split view is not detectable from a single service without a standardized listing or registration with more than one service (Section 9, Section 13).¶
The feed is complete only relative to what the deployment is expected to register and to enumerate (Section 6.7); an omitted or withheld record is visible only against that expectation (Section 13).¶
For that to hold, every producer MUST compute the identical sub. This
profile fixes a single construction; a producer MUST use it. A producer
MUST NOT use any other. The sub is the URI formed by appending the
literal path segment missions and the Mission id to the issuer:¶
<issuer>/missions/<id>¶
The issuer is used exactly as it appears in the mission claim, with
any single trailing slash removed, and the id is appended without
transformation; the issuance profile constrains the Mission Identifier
to the URL-safe characters [A-Za-z0-9_-] ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]),
so no percent-encoding is required. Because the construction is fixed,
independent producers writing evidence about the same Mission (the
Mission Issuer, a PDP, a harness) compute the same sub and write to one
feed.¶
The sub is a correlator, not a credential; presenting it authorizes
nothing ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).¶
A Child Mission ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation])
is its own Mission with its own id and issuer, so its evidence forms
its own feed; its lifecycle events, including a cascaded transition,
appear in that feed. The event that triggered the cascade is in the
parent's feed. Lineage is navigable in both directions: the child's
lineage to the parent is the parent member of its mission claim,
which an auditor follows to the parent's sub to see that trigger,
and the parent's children are enumerated by the Child Evidence
records on the parent's feed (Section 6.3), each carrying the
child's id.¶
Across trust domains a Mission's issuer and id are unchanged
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), so every producer in every
domain computes the same sub. They share one feed only when they
register with the same Transparency Service.¶
Where domains register with different services, each service holds a partial feed and its non-equivocation guarantee is per-service (Section 9); an auditor that needs the Mission's whole history reconciles it across those services. A deployment that wants a single coherent feed SHOULD have its cross-domain producers register with one shared service.¶
On registration the Transparency Service returns a Receipt, a signed inclusion proof ([RFC9943]).¶
The producer SHOULD retain the Receipt with the evidence, or on the Mission record, as a Transparent Statement (the Signed Statement augmented with its Receipt). A producer that claims offline verifiability for a record MUST retain its Receipt, or an entry identifier the service guarantees resolvable for the audit horizon; a registered record with neither is verifiable only against the live service.¶
A relying party verifies a Transparent Statement offline, without contacting the producer or the service:¶
verify the Signed Statement signature against the producing
component's (iss) trust anchor;¶
verify the Receipt signature against the Transparency Service's published key or configured trust anchor;¶
verify the inclusion proof binds the Signed Statement to the log;¶
when auditing a specific Mission, confirm sub is that Mission's
feed (Section 8); and¶
retrieve the referenced evidence under access control, rehash the evidence bytes as Section 6.3 fixes them for its type (with the retained salt, where one was used, Section 14), and compare the result against the committed digest.¶
A relying party MUST complete steps 1 through 5 before relying on a record as transparent.¶
This profile distinguishes an integrity failure, where the transparency claim is false, from an audit failure, where the claim cannot be fully checked but is not refuted, as the consent evidence profile does ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]):¶
A failed Signed Statement signature, Receipt signature, or inclusion proof (steps 1 through 3), or a committed hash that does not match the retrieved evidence (step 5), is an integrity failure. The relying party MUST reject the Transparent Statement. It MUST NOT treat the record as transparent.¶
Evidence that cannot be retrieved within the retention window (step 5 incomplete) is an audit failure, not an integrity failure. Steps 1 through 3 still establish that the record was registered, at a committed time, in a non-equivocating log; only the content check is incomplete. The relying party MUST NOT treat the record as content-verified. It MUST NOT treat unretrievable evidence as evidence of tampering. An erasure record on the feed (Section 6.3.3) explains the gap as recorded-basis erasure; a gap without one, in a deployment that registers erasures, is itself worth recording, though still not proof of tampering.¶
A producer or Transparency Service key that the relying party cannot verify against a trust anchor (step 1 or step 2 unresolved) is an audit failure, not an integrity failure. The relying party cannot attribute the Signed Statement or the Receipt to a known key, so it MUST NOT treat the record as transparent. It is not evidence of tampering, and the relying party MUST NOT treat it as such.¶
A deployment MAY register the same evidence with more than one Transparency Service and retain multiple Receipts.¶
A relying party detects equivocation by comparing two things across
services: the
Receipts issued for the same Signed Statement, which must prove inclusion
of the identical statement, and the records listed for the same sub,
which must not differ in ways the append-only property forbids. A service
that presents inconsistent Receipts for one statement, or a subject
listing that diverges from another service's, is equivocating, and the
relying party can rely on the others.¶
Detection is a duty, not a side effect. A deployment claiming this
profile MUST designate the party that periodically re-verifies feed
consistency (retained Receipts and the sub listing, against each
service it registers with) and that party's alerting obligation on
failure. A deployment with a single service and no designated monitor
MUST NOT claim non-equivocation: it obtains tamper evidence only
against alteration after registration, not against a split view.¶
At the approval event for Mission
msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-, the Mission Issuer records
Consent Evidence and registers it. It does not put the disclosure in the
log; it signs a Signed Statement whose payload is the hash of the Consent
Evidence, carried inline, with the hash algorithm and the evidence media
type in the protected header (Section 6.1). The sub is the
Mission feed, derived from the Mission issuer and id; the iss is
the Mission Issuer. Protected header, in CBOR extended diagnostic notation
([RFC8610], Appendix G):¶
{
/ alg / 1: -7, / ES256 /
/ payload-hash-alg / 258: -16, / SHA-256 /
/ payload-preimage-content-type / 259:
"application/mission-consent-evidence+json",
/ kid / 4: h'61732d6b65792d323032362d7133',
/ CWT Claims / 15: {
/ iss / 1: "https://as.example.com",
/ sub / 2: "https://as.example.com/missions/
msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-"
}
}
¶
The payload is the SHA-256 digest of the retained Consent Evidence object
as issued (Section 6.3), carried inline as the raw digest whose
base64url form is CnS3nT9sQ7nM2vL4tY6bD1eF8jC5wH0pV2nR3kQ4xVz, not that
display string. The Transparency Service appends the statement
and returns a Receipt, a COSE_Sign1 with an inclusion proof in its
unprotected header, which the Mission Issuer keeps with the evidence as a
Transparent Statement.¶
As the Mission proceeds, its other producers write to the same sub:
the Mission Issuer registers a derivation record when it derives the
agent's token (Section 6.3.2), the
PDP registers a decision-evidence commitment when it permits the
journal-entries.write, and the Mission Issuer registers a
lifecycle-change commitment when alice later completes the Mission.
Collecting the records registered under that one sub (Section 6.6)
gives the Mission's whole history, in order, append-only:¶
sub = https://as.example.com/missions/msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9- #1 approval-event iss=as.example.com t0 #2 consent-evidence iss=as.example.com t0 #3 derivation-record iss=as.example.com t0 #4 decision-evidence iss=pdp.example.com t0+6h #5 lifecycle: completed iss=as.example.com t0+6h¶
A compliance auditor in another domain, holding none of these
deployments' logs, takes the Transparent Statement for #2, verifies the
Receipt against the Transparency Service's published key and the
inclusion proof, retrieves the Consent Evidence under access control,
and rehashes the retained object to compare against the committed digest.
The auditor now knows that exact disclosure was registered at t0,
included in the service's signed tree head, and unaltered since,
without trusting the Mission Issuer's own records. Detecting a later
drop or reorder by the service rests on trusting that single service
or reconciling across several (Section 11).¶
Two failures are distinct (Section 9.1). If the retrieved
Consent Evidence hashes to a value other than the committed digest, the
retained record was altered after registration: an integrity failure,
and the auditor rejects it. If the
record cannot be retrieved at all, the auditor still knows from the
Receipt that record #2 was registered at t0 and included in a signed
tree head, but cannot confirm its content: an audit failure, not proof
of tampering.¶
Transparency makes the evidence set tamper-evident and independently verifiable: a registered record's inclusion is provable from its Receipt against a signed tree head, and a cross-domain party verifies a record without trusting the producer's logs, which a bare signature over a narrowed token cannot give it ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). Against a single Transparency Service, that a record is not later silently dropped or reordered and that the feed is the same for every auditor are trusted properties of that service, not ones a Receipt proves: this profile defines no consistency proofs or gossip, so checking them rests on registering with more than one service (Section 9, Section 13).¶
It does not make a dishonest producer honest. A producer can register a false record; transparency makes the false record permanent, attributable, and visible to every auditor, which is accountability, not prevention, the transparency substrate's own model ([RFC9943]). It also proves only that a record was registered, not that the action the record describes occurred or was authorized; that is the evidence's own semantics. And because statements commit by hash, a Receipt without the retrievable evidence proves only that some record was logged, not what it said.¶
A producer conforming to this profile MUST:¶
register Mission evidence as Signed Statements that commit to the evidence by an inline hash, never the evidence in the clear (Section 6);¶
set sub to the Mission feed by the fixed construction of Section 8;¶
set iss to its own issuer identifier, bound to the signing key; and¶
register at least the approval event and every Mission lifecycle transition (Section 6).¶
A relying party conforming to this profile MUST:¶
perform verification steps 1 through 5 of Section 9 before relying on a record as transparent;¶
treat a signature, Receipt, inclusion-proof, or committed-hash mismatch as an integrity failure and reject the record;¶
treat unretrievable evidence as an audit failure, not as evidence of tampering (Section 9.1); and¶
treat a producer or Transparency Service key it cannot verify against a trust anchor as an audit failure, and not treat the record as transparent (Section 9.1).¶
The transparency substrate's security considerations apply. This profile adds:¶
Accountability, not prevention. Transparency detects and attributes tampering and omission after the fact; it does not stop a producer from registering a false record (Section 11).¶
Transparency Service trust. A single service is trusted not to equivocate; a deployment that needs that property checked SHOULD register with multiple independent services (Section 9).¶
Operator independence. The Transparency Service SHOULD be operated independently of the authoritative producers for the feeds it holds. The cross-domain value of transparency is verification without trust in the producer's own infrastructure (Section 11); a service operated by the producer whose records it holds returns the auditor to exactly that trust. Where producer and service share an operator, registration with a second, independent service is the compensating control. A deployment without one MUST NOT claim cross-domain verifiability for the affected records. A deployment states its service topology (self-run, vendor-shared, or third-party) and each operator's relationship to the producers in its Mission Deployment Profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]).¶
Completeness. Transparency proves what was registered, not that everything was registered. A producer that omits a record cannot forge inclusion, but the gap is visible only if an auditor expects the record; a deployment SHOULD register evidence on a predictable schedule so omissions stand out in the feed.¶
Receipt and key management. A Receipt is only as trustworthy as the Transparency Service key that signs it; relying parties manage those trust anchors as they do the producers'.¶
Log lifecycle. Transparency Service key rotation, log retirement, and migration of a Mission's feed between services are deferred to future work, and a deployment whose Missions outlive a single log instance handles them by local arrangement until then. One interim rule holds now: the core's retired-key rule ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) applies to the Transparency Service's own keys, with the audit horizon of the feeds a key covers as the retention bound.¶
Receipt verification keys. A deployment MUST pin and retain the Transparency Service verification keys that validate its retained Receipts, for the audit horizon of the feeds each key covers. A Receipt is the longest-lived artifact this profile produces and is the compensating control for issuer key compromise ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]); a Receipt whose signing key is no longer resolvable cannot be verified offline, and the compensating control is lost.¶
A Transparency Service log is append-only and may be widely readable, so nothing registered can be redacted later. A producer MUST NOT register Mission evidence in the clear; it registers an inline hash commitment (Section 6), and the evidence, which can carry task descriptions, principals, and high-risk authority, is retained separately under access control.¶
A deployment SHOULD weigh whether the Mission's durable identifier,
its existence, and its registration cadence are sensitive, and whether
the issuer and id that compose the sub reveal more than
intended, before registering a Mission's evidence in a shared or
widely readable log. Even the committed metadata leaks
information: the sub is a durable per-Mission correlator and the
registration times reveal a Mission's activity pattern. The sub
construction is fixed (Section 8) and does not expose the Subject
directly, so the concern is not Subject leakage but that the
identifier, existence, and cadence are visible in the log.¶
Evidence whose canonical bytes are low-entropy or drawn from an enumerable space MUST be committed with a random salt, retained alongside the evidence and hashed together with the evidence's canonical bytes. Without a salt, a party that can guess the evidence can confirm the commitment by dictionary; the salt makes the committed digest unguessable while still reproducible at verification, where the salt is retrieved with the evidence (Section 9).¶
The lifecycle-transition object carries the salt as a required member of its canonical bytes for exactly this reason (Section 6.3.1), and any other profile-fixed low-entropy shape MUST do the same.¶
Deleting retained evidence has a consequence the log makes permanent. The
Receipt, the sub, and the registration cadence stay in the log, but the
evidence they commit to is gone, so every record over the erased evidence
becomes a permanent audit failure (Section 9.1): its
content can never again be checked against the commitment. A deployment
that may need to erase evidence, for a data-subject request or a
retention limit, weighs this before registering. Registration does not
prevent erasure; it converts an erased record into a permanent, visible
gap rather than a silent one.¶
A deployment that erases committed evidence MUST register an erasure record (Section 6.3.3) on the same feed, so the gap carries its basis: lawful erasure and convenient loss are otherwise indistinguishable, and the verification taxonomy forbids reading the gap as tampering.¶
The evidence layer is an accountability substrate, and unbounded it becomes a surveillance substrate. A deployment SHOULD apply these minimizations to the evidence it produces and registers, across this profile and the runtime and consent-evidence records it aggregates:¶
Data minimization. Record the action class, resource, and bound parameters a decision turned on, not full user content or model input, unless the content is itself the audited artifact.¶
Field classification. Classify evidence fields by sensitivity when the record is produced, so access, export, and retention key on the class rather than on later review; the Mission Deployment Profile names the scheme in use ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-architecture]).¶
Separation. Keep operational logs distinct from audit-grade evidence, so verbose debugging data is not retained at the audit horizon or committed to a transparency log.¶
Access control. Evidence access is itself policy-governed; reading a Mission's evidence is a privileged operation, not a byproduct of holding a Mission reference, and a deployment SHOULD record evidence reads as it records the actions the evidence describes: access to the audit trail is part of the audit trail.¶
Retention. Retain for the declared audit horizon and no longer; the horizon is per-Mission, not indefinite.¶
Identifier strategy. The durable per-Mission sub is a
cross-audience correlator; a deployment that needs to limit
correlation adopts the directed or audience-pairwise Mission
references named as future work by the issuance profile and the
AAuth binding, when available
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission],
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]).¶
Export. An evidence export preserves integrity (the commitments and their salts) without over-sharing the raw committed content beyond the recipient's need.¶
This document defines four media types for the evidence types of Section 6.3 that no other profile defines:¶
application/mission-approval-record+json for the approval-event
record;¶
application/mission-lifecycle-transition+json for the minimal
lifecycle-transition object (Section 6.3.1);¶
application/mission-derivation-record+json for the derivation
record (Section 6.3.2); and¶
application/mission-erasure-record+json for the erasure record
(Section 6.3.3).¶
This document makes no registration request for them yet; registration is deferred pending a demonstrated cross-domain interoperability need, and deployments using these media types do so by local agreement until then.¶
The other evidence media types this profile registers into a Transparency Service are defined elsewhere:¶
the runtime decision, execution, and refusal evidence types by the AuthZEN profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen]);¶
the consent evidence type by the consent evidence profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-consent-evidence]);¶
the Mission Mandate media type by the Mandate profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-mandate]);¶
the Child Evidence type identifier by the child-delegation profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]);¶
the Harness Evidence type identifier by the harness profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-harness]); and¶
the Signals SET media type application/secevent+jwt by RFC 8417,
which the Signals profile carries the event in
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]).¶
The Signed Statement and Receipt media types are the transparency
substrate's ([RFC9943]). This profile derives the sub by profile
rather than registering a new identifier.¶
This document is part of the Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 work and profiles the SCITT architecture to make Mission evidence transparent and independently verifiable.¶