[graap-wg] proposal: agreement lifecycle end-games

[Karl Czajkowski]

Jon, I do think I understand what you are asking for. The difficulty
lies, I think, in the fact that the "WS architecture" way of doing
things is to treat security-related things like signature as
orthogonal aspects that get folded into a service deployment.

The underlying audit/proof problem you are concerned with requires the
persistent naming and retention of protocol messages, e.g. "at time
T0, party 1 initiated agreement with offer O" and "at time T1, party 2
accepted offer O" in some way that the eventual arbiter can believe
them to be accurate historical data.

I do not think WSRF makes it harder to think about this.  The
WS-Agreement resource is not a message, but an addressable
representation of the online process within which these messages are
correlated.  The WSRF modeling approach we are using is about making
this process or "session" manageable, in the sense of being able to
incorporate these agreement processes into a larger worldview of
discovery and monitoring systems, etc.  So, the Agreement resource
gives us a dynamic view of the "current" status, while I think
contract resolution requires an archived view of different key
messages/interactions in the process like "agreement happened" and
"agreement was violated (or satisfied) during time interval I".

I think the question here is whether this "proof of agreement" problem
is in or out of scope for the WS-Agreement standard. We have already
declared "proof of satisfaction/violation" to be out of scope, so I
had assumed proof of agreement would be treated the same way.

I think you are asking for "proof of agreement" to be made in scope. I
do not know how to do this in a way that is not biased towards one
security/trust model, so that makes me afraid to approach it.  Can you
provide a more concrete proposal, or at least argue for why proof of
agreement is different than the larger proof of satisfaction/violation
such that we should keep banging our heads on this for the first
version of the standard?

I'm not discounting the value of these proofs, but merely questioning
whether they are tractable enough to put in scope...


karl

-- 
Karl Czajkowski
karlcz at univa.com