Should RVPs be able to set RVs for Endorsements

[nedmsmith]

Normally, an RVP mints RVs that are applied to Evidence (only). The question is raised whether it is meaningful if an RVP could also mint RVs for Endorsements.

Note: It is possible for an Endorser to endorse another Endorser's Claims using conditional endorsements so long as the condition expressions are permitted to use possible state expressions.

The current spec is silent. That is to say, the cmtype of the condition ECT is not specified.

[deeglaze]

If cosigning endorsements is always an endorsement, can we say that a conditional endorsement can have optional additions, such that the meaning is just to add the CoRIM issuer's authority to the condition environment/measurement as an endorsement cmtype, or is that too punny?

[nedmsmith]

can we say that a conditional endorsement can have optional additions, such that the meaning is just to add the CoRIM issuer's authority

I believe all forms of endorsement triples allow this already. Even if the condition included authorized-by (used for matching). The addition wouldn't include the matched authority. Even if the addition included authorized-by, that would represent something else in the internal representation than authority.

[nedmsmith]

environment/measurement as an endorsement cmtype

Maybe I'm not following? The triple's predicate determines its cmtype. Otherwise, the cmtype is known to the Verifier as the various inputs are accepted and validated (phase 0 / 1), even if the inputs aren't expressed as CoMID triples. The output from processing an Endorsement triple is still an endorsement. This is true even when an endorsement condition searches over Evidence, corroborated RVs, or other Endorsements.

The question can be recast in terms for whether there is something like "corroboration" for Endorsements. Given the purpose of corroboration is to convert reference state into actual state, applying this to endorsements seems unnecessary since endorsements are defined to be actual state already.

The subtlety may be that for RVs, the totality of the inputs represents more Evidence states than are present in an ACS. While for Endorsement, the conditions describe a search space that is restricted to an Attester's actual states (even though the search may include corroborated RVs and other Endorsements).

I think this means that for RV processing, there's an outer loop of RVs (reference states) that is applied to an inner loop that iterates over the ACS entries.