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AIINFRA-005 ready P0 research host assurance Effort L

Explain how an operator establishes and continuously rechecks the identity, composition, firmware, and configuration of vendor-built racks.

Depends on: AIINFRA-002

Outcome

A lesson sequence connects factory evidence, receiving inspection, discovery, inventory, attestation, configuration validation, burn-in, fleet admission, and continuous runtime assurance.

Why it matters

An operator cannot safely infer that a delivered rack contains the expected components, firmware, roots of trust, and configuration merely because it came from an approved vendor. At AI-infrastructure scale, assurance must be automatable, repeatable, and useful after the initial intake check.

Deliverables

  • Define threat model, trust anchors, identities, evidence, policies, and failure responses.
  • Compare factory, offline intake, installation-time, and continuous checks.
  • Trace component discovery across BMC, Redfish, PLDM, PCIe, SMBIOS, firmware inventory, and attestation evidence.
  • Explain where physical fixtures help and where they become a throughput bottleneck.
  • Develop a concrete onboarding state machine and evidence record.

Acceptance criteria

  • The material distinguishes authenticity, integrity, configuration compliance, and health.
  • Every claimed property names its evidence source and trust boundary.
  • The workflow includes quarantine, remediation, exception handling, and later drift detection.
  • The lesson identifies what cannot be proven purely in software.