By Monika Ermert - The Internet Engineering Group is back next week in Berlin for its 96th meeting, with another record number of sessions on new “topics” and a follow-up to the “Singapore venue” discussion. Should the IETF not go to countries with human rights issues anymore – and where to go at all? Discussions over human rights, and as the Berlin agenda shows privacy in particular, seem to become a constant companion of IETF meetings, as is a debate on how finding new ways to fund the IETF with the endowment program.

Eight “Bird of Feathers”-sessions are on the IETF Berlin agenda, spanning such fashionable topics as intelligent transport systems (ITS), a protocol stack for transfers of crypto currency (Ledger) and the Internet of Things.

A lot for IoT-fans

The latter is receiving considerable attention in the IETF standardisation work by now, which is well reflected in the cover article of the new IETF journal. IAB Chair Andrew Sullivan and IAB member Dave Thaler underline there that the IETF's traditional goal of network interoperability gives it a role in “making diverse things work together as much as possible”.

And the list is long for IoT-fans in Berlin: beside the two BoF sessions on Low-power wide area networks (lpwan) and low-latency, low loss transport (L4S), there are eight more WG sessions that deal with various aspects of Internet of things standardisation (see the list compiled in the ISOC IETF 96 guide).

On transport

Beside the work on the chic stuff, good old transport seems to be up for rejuvenation. For transport-people the BoF on Quic, Google's Udp based new transport protocol should be a highlight. After several years of pampering and promoting Quic, Google engineers now seem to be ready to bring it to the standardisation process.

But there is much more on transport rejuvenation, a fact that was also mentioned by the IETF Chair in his preview of the meeting. Beside the L4S and Quic BoFs, the Plus Bof might result in interesting discussions. Plus stands for "Path Layer UDP Substrate" and in fact follows up to work under the acronym SPUD (see mailing list).

The goal, as the IETF Chair describes it, “is to enable the deployment of new, encrypted transport protocols, while providing a transport-independent method to signal flow semantics under transport and application control.” While the proponents promise “compatibility with existing middleboxes” there have been warnings against a middle layer exposing information about encrypted flows when SPUD was around first.

Privacy in transport, DNS and more

Privacy topics by the way also seem to become more and more mainstream in IETF work on all layers. A new version of TCP, TCPINC is working on cryptographic protection of TCP streams and encryption negotiation options for TCP. New or recently founded working groups look into enhancing privacy for SIP (SIP best practice recommendations against network dangers to privacy, SIPBrandy) and on privacy enhanced RTP conferencing (PERC). Work on an open specification of PGP continues as well as using TLS for better mail privacy (see UTA).

As with all new ideas coming from the developers, deployment and transition (see an interesting draft on transition problems in general) remains an issue. For the DNS privacy enhancing DNS over TLS, work on implementation is being discussed briefly, following up a call by Sarah Dickinson to set up pilot servers. It will be interesting to see how many pilots are already out there.

DNS – the names debate continues

The likely highlight of the DNS Operations WG session in Berlin should be another edition of the debate over how domain names should be allocated by the IETF, if they should be allocated by the IETF at all. Both camps have updated their respective draft documents and both will defend it during a thirty minute discussion in Berlin. More DNS work, with also a little taste on privacy, is underway in the DNS service discovery (DNSSD) session. An update session on Tuesday (12.30-13.45) has news on the rolling of the zone signing key and the key signing key, the latter quite an event for DNS operators worldwide.

With the IANA transition being in the stretch one elsewhere, that topic is not on the agenda of the IETF. But for those interested in more politics, not only is there a talk by a representative of the German regulatory authority on the net neutrality guidelines of Berec, the European regulatory authority. Those who want to listen to some German politicians can join an event organised by the ISOC German Chapter on “Security in between security and surveillance”.