Dear colleagues,
This is the report from the IAB to the community about our activities
since IETF 93. We're taking the occasion of the compressed plenary to
move more of our reporting to this email, which we'll send before
meetings. Of course, we encourage as ever discussion of things you
want to raise in the plenary. We hope, however, that providing this
in advance will allow you more time to prepare any questions you have
about our activities, while allowing us to concentrate in the plenary
on things we think raise issues or are most important for the
community to think about. We want to know whether this new approach
is agreeable. Let us know at the mic, or else send mail to
iab(_at_)iab(_dot_)org. You can do that about any other issue in this report
too. In general, we value feedback and want to respond to issues you see.
The IAB has a few chartered roles. We confirm the appointments to the
IESG and perform standards process oversight and handle appeals -- two
jobs we didn't have to do since IETF 93. We also perform
architectural oversight, we manage the RFC series and the IETF's
relationship with IANA, and we handle liaisons both to ISOC and to
other organizations. We try to ensure that anything we do is part of
one of these areas of responsibility, and we try to make sure these
are all covered.
Since IETF 93, here's what we've done:
• RFC 7624, “Confidentiality in the Face of Pervasive
Surveillance: A Threat Model and Problem Statement”
(Architectural oversight)
• RFC 7663, “Report from the IAB Workshop on Stack Evolution in a
Middlebox Internet (SEMI)” (Architectural oversight)
• RFC 7669, “Assigning Digital Object Identifiers to RFCs” (RFC
Series)
• MaRNEW (Managing Radio Networks in an Encrypted World) Workshop,
with ISOC, AT&T, and GSMA (Architectural oversight, External
liaison)
• Comments on the ICG proposal (External liaison, IANA)
• Comments on the CCWG 2d draft report (External liaison)
• Appointed Tim Wicinski to ICANN Nomcom (External liaison)
• Comment to FCC on rules regarding radiofrequency equipment
(External liaison)
The MaRNEW workshop inspired some questions about support for people
who can't participate in person in a workshop, and we said at the time
we'd follow up. We're discussing it at IETF 94 and will follow up at
the end of or a little after the meeting.
The IAB has a number of documents in flight. Most of these are the
result of programs, though one is old work that's not quite complete:
draft-iab-crypto-alg-agility-08
draft-iab-filtering-considerations-08
draft-iab-strint-report-02
draft-iab-privsec-confidentiality-mitigations-03
draft-iab-protocol-transitions-00
draft-iab-rfc-preservation-01
draft-iab-xml2rfcv2-02
You can keep track of IAB stream documents at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/stream/iab/.
The last two in that list are about the RFC series. You should know
that the documents specifying the new RFC format are coming soon, so
get ready!
Of course, with the anticipated change to IANA's relationship to the
US Government, the IAB has been spending a lot of time on that topic.
Some of that time may not be representing the IAB as such, but we have
tried to keep involved in whatever dimensions we think might be useful.
The IAB organizes its work into programs. You can find all the
current programs at <https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/>.
Broadly speaking we can distinguish between two thrusts here: those
programs that are about architectural questions, and those programs
that are basically management tasks. The former are expected to
complete some work and eventually wind down. The latter are likely to
persist as long as the management task remains in place.
Management programs:
IANA Evolution
IETF Protocol Registries Oversight Committee (IPROC, with IAOC)
Liaison Oversight
RFC Editor (includes RSOC)
Architectural issues:
Emergency Services
Internationalization
IP Stack Evolution
Names and Identifiers
Privacy and Security
We've made an internal commitment to ourselves that work that the
architectural programs should produce an interesting plenary topic
with some frequency, and expect that programs which can't do that are
wound down. This time, the Stack Evolution program is the source of
the topic.
Here are two programs we'd like to highlight this time, because
they've been busy:
Privacy and Security
The program published RFC 7624, and draft-iab-crypto-alg-agility
is waiting in the RFC Editor queue, as noted above.
The program has adopted
draft-iab-privsec-confidentiality-mitigations and
draft-housley-web-pki-problems into the IAB stream.
The program is considering
draft-hardie-privsec-metadata-insertion.
IANA Strategy Program
At ICANN 52, two weeks ago, the Names community figured out a way
forward on their accountability mechanisms based on the Sole
Designator model. Three months of intense work will be needed to
achieve a very aggressive schedule. As part of implementing
accountability mechanisms, some of the ICANN Bylaws will become
"fundamental", which means that they become very difficult to change.
The ICANN Mission Statement will become a fundamental bylaw, and the
IAB has asked for it to be updated before it becomes so hard to
change. There is a fair amount of support for making the ICANN
Mission Statement current.
The ICG completed the proposal for NTIA, but the Names community
portion has a pointer to the ICANN accountability document. The
proposal cannot be delivered until this pointer is snapped.
Best regards,
Andrew Sullivan
For the IAB