Letter for Dispatch, re: July Meeting

tags: letters

Dear Dispatch Chairs:

Thanks very much for your assistance to date on our work with dCBOR and Gordian Envelope, and how we can integrate that work with the IETF. We've already produced new versions of both the I-D for dCBOR and Gordian Envelope per your (and other) feedback

As you've suggested, we've also begun to bring dCBOR to the CBOR groups and are finding solid interest there.

For our Gordian Envelope work, you suggested that we need to write a requirements document to talk about the basic need for holder-based hashed elision (whether it's Gordian Envelope or not). We taken a first stab at this with a rough Problem Statement and Areas of Work document.

Generally, we feel that the development of new protocols needs to meet the highest standards of privacy and human rights by adapting the suggestions of RFC 6973 (Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols) and RFC 8280 (Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations), which highlight the importance of implementing new techniques for data minimization, correlation avoidance, and identity management, among others. One of the most promising techniques to achieve these goals is hash-based elision, a selective disclosure technique that enables efficient and secure data sharing while protecting users' privacy. That's the heart of our Problem Statement.

However, we obviously need more input for this. We'd like to invite new people into the conversation, to work on requirements, and to also bring in the people who are already working with us on Gordian Envelope. Our goal is to:

• Develop a comprehensive understanding of hash-based elision and its benefits for privacy and human rights in the context of internet protocols.
• Identify potential challenges and limitations associated with implementing hash-based elision in various scenarios.
• Establish best practices for incorporating hash-based elision into new and existing IETF protocols.

Since Wolf McNally and I are planning to attend IETF this July in San Francisco, we hope that as a next step we can organize an in-person gathering to talk about hash-based elision as a potential IETF privacy technique and about Gordian Envelope more specifically.

You had indicated that a Birds of a Feather gathering might be possible. If so, how would we arrange this? Who would we need to talk to and what are the deadlines?

As we understand it, the prime requirements would be that Problem Statement and approval from Area Directors. We hope to work with people in the Applications and Real-Time (ART) area instead of the Security (SEC) area. Though hashing is a cryptographic function, we believe that it's well-understood and widely used enough that the actual hashing will not be the main focus of the group. Instead, we expect the group to focus on data formats, serialization, and application-level protocols, all of which are well within the remit of ART; we think that working with ART would also encourage collaboration with related efforts.

If we aren't able to meet the criteria for a Birds of a Feather gathering, how can we get a less-formal gathering onto the schedule for the IETF event? Again, who should we talk to and what would the deadlines be here?

Thanks once more for your help,

Christopher Allen