Handling Assets in the Secure Asset Transfer Protocol - One Schema to Handle Them All (Position Paper)

Blockchain technology has expanded into various domains, but the lack of interoperability standards remains a significant barrier to seamless communication and asset transfers between systems. The Secure Asset Transfer Protocol (SATP), developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), offers a framework for cross-chain transfers but leaves key challenges like pre-transfer verification, asset specification, and trust assumptions unresolved. This work contributes to SATP by proposing an asset schema handling mechanism that addresses data formats and its integration with SATP's setup stage. A literature review of SATP-based and non-SATP solutions informs this proposal, which introduces a third-party certification authority to commission and validate asset schemas. The solution incorporates an Asset Definition Authority to mediate asset setup and is evaluated through a security-focused threat model. This research advances asset schema standardization and interoperability, providing a foundation for further exploration.