Skip to main content
  • The new GREEN working group gets ready for an energy efficient Internet

    The Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking (GREEN) working group will explore use cases, derive requirements, and provide solutions to optimize energy efficiency across the Internet.

    29 Oct 2024
  • IETF Annual Report 2023

    The IETF Annual Report 2023 provides a summary of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and RFC Editor community activities from last year.

    25 Oct 2024
  • IETF 122 Bangkok registration open

    Registration is now available for the IETF 122 Bangkok meeting scheduled for 15-21 March 2025, which is the first time registration for an IETF meeting has been open before the preceding meeting registration has closed.

    25 Oct 2024
  • First Impressions from the IAB AI-CONTROL workshop

    The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) organized a workshop on 19-20 September 2024 to discuss issues around and possibilities for practical mechanisms that publishers of data on the Internet could employ to opt out of use by the Large Language Models and other machine learning techniques used for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

    24 Oct 2024
  • New Participant activities at the IETF: Major expansion coming for IETF 122!

    The IETF New Participants program has a long history of helping people just starting out in the IETF be more effective. Based on feedback from program participants over the past two years, and in consultation with the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), the program will be significantly enhanced starting with IETF 122 Bangkok.

    22 Oct 2024

Filter by topic and date

Filter by topic and date

IETF 90 Summary

29 Jul 2014

IETF-90 is over and I wanted to provide a summary of what I saw in the meeting.

But first things first, a number of other people have also made very useful observations. Andrew Sullivan wrote a blog article earlier about his perception of the IANA discussions. And Benoit Claise talked about industry interest for YANG in his article. Dan York’s blog reported his perceptions from the meeting. And finally, in my blog series, Nik Tomkinson relayed some of his experiences on attending the IETF as a robot.

Overall, I think we had a great meeting, with a good turnout of 1231 people on site from 54 countries. My personal highlights for the week include improving the security and privacy, Internet of Things and dealing with the transition of IANA oversight.

I would like to thank all of our participants, remote or on site. I would also like to thank the our sponsors and in particular Ericsson for being the host of the meeting. Thank you!

The Internet of Things

This is a big topic for the IETF. And we seem to add more work in every meeting! The first new item last week was the low-power and lossy networking plugfest, an event where the participants were testing their implementations against each other. Such tests are a big part of the IETF mode of operation. While formally outside the meeting, implementors often gather at the IETF meeting to run such tests.

The second new item was the ACE working group, focusing on the question of how to bootstrap security and authorisation in a network of smart objects.

The third new item was the Bits-and-Bites event, which has been running for some years, but this time we had a new format and a focus topic. We had ten different organisations demonstrating Internet of Things solutions, and a lot of interested participants looking at the demos. We will be continuing the Bits-and-Bites event series in future IETFs in the same fashion – please propose focus topics that you would like to see.

Security and Privacy

Earlier this year we came to the conclusion that the IETF needs to do its part to ensure that Internet technology provides better tools against mass surveillance activities. Of course, improving the security of the Internet is no easy task, but we are working hard on several fronts, including updating the TLS and HTTP protocols (see TLS and HTTPBIS working group efforts).

One of the difficult tradeoffs that we have discussed this week is how increased use of encryption affects caching and other network functions. This continues to be a challenge, but at least it is clear after this week that HTTPS remains as an end-to-end security solution. Various caching and secure tunnelling solutions may arise for other traffic, however.

The newly formed TCPINC working group had it first meeting on developing a new layer of opportunistic security, mainly for applications that don’t use current transport layer security as used for example in the web.

IANA

The IETF has been discussing this actively since the announcement from the US government in March. I am happy about the transition, but I think we at the IETF see it as a part of longer term evolution that has already happened with regards to how we deal with the oversight of IANA. In the last 15 years, we have developed contracts, oversight mechanisms, and processes that our part of IANA is running on.

Our meeting this week confirmed that the IETF community believes these mechanisms are sufficient also going forward. We will be documenting how these mechanisms address the requirements for the oversight in the coming weeks and months. I feel very optimistic about the process.

Next Up

IETF-91 is coming up in November, held in Honolulu. I would like to welcome everyone to the meeting!

But the IETF work runs all the time on mailing lists. What can we expect in the coming months? The major projects, such as WebRTC, HTTP 2.0, and so on will of course continue. Some of the key milestones ahead include the publication of the final HTTP 2.0 RFC (later this year), as well as concluding our part in the IANA transition work (also planned for completion within 2014).

Please visit our newcomers page if you would like to join us in this important work.


Share this page