draft-wendt-stir-vesper-use-cases — VESPER use cases and requirements

draft-wendt-stir-vesper-use-cases (Wendt) is the informational companion to the VESPER core specification. I am the primary author. The draft develops ten concrete use cases that motivate VESPER’s design and articulates the requirements those use cases impose on the technical mechanism. The VESPER topic page lists and summarizes each use case; this page covers what’s specific to the draft itself.

What this draft contributes

The draft serves two purposes that the core specification (draft-wendt-stir-vesper) doesn’t directly address. First, it provides the requirements lens — the use cases collectively articulate what a verifiable origination-authorization mechanism needs to provide, and the requirements distilled from them (Verifiable Enablement, Lifecycle Management, Transparency and Auditability, Cross-Channel Applicability, Policy Separation, Attestation Grounding) are the criteria against which the core spec’s design choices can be evaluated. Second, it provides detailed treatment of each use case beyond what the topic page or the core draft can carry — the operational scenario for each, the trust requirements specific to that case, and how the VESPER mechanism addresses it.

What changed in the -03 restructuring

The -03 revision was a major restructuring. The previous version ran approximately 290 lines; -03 trimmed it to roughly 160 lines through consolidation and a tighter conceptual organization. A new Conventions and Definitions section was added to ground the vocabulary used across the use cases. The use case set was consolidated to the current ten cases.

The trimming reflects the same trajectory visible in the core spec: less mechanism-specific verbiage, tighter alignment to the underlying STIR architecture, more reliance on standard infrastructure rather than VESPER-specific abstractions.

Status

Currently draft-wendt-stir-vesper-use-cases-03, an individual informational draft. The work continues to evolve as the core architecture matures and as deployment scenarios surface new requirements.