Reputation Services
charter-ietf-repute-01

In the open Internet, making a meaningful choice about the handling
      of content requires an assessment of its safety or "trustworthiness".
      This can be based on a trust metric for the owner (identity) of an
      identifier associated with the content, to distinguish (likely)
      good actors from bad actors.  The generic term for such information
      is "reputation".  This working group will develop mechanisms for
      reputation reporting by independent services.  One mechanism will be
      for a basic assessment of trustworthiness.  Another will provide a
      range of attribute/value data that is used as input to such an
      assessment.  Each service determines the attributes it reports.
  
      Various mechanisms have been developed for associating a verified
      identifier with email content, such as with SPF (RFC4408) and DKIM
      (RFC4871).  An existing reputation query mechanism is
      Vouch-by-Reference (RFC5518). It provides a simple Boolean
      response concerning a domain name used for email.  The current working
      group effort will expand upon this, to support additional
      applications -- such as Web pages and hosts -- and a wider range of
      reporting information.
  
      Given the recent adoption of domain name verification for email,
      by SPF and DKIM, the most obvious initial use case for reputation is
      for email.  Inbound email filters that perform message authentication
      can obtain a verified domain name and then consult a reputation 
  service
      provider to make a determination (perhaps also based on other
      factors) of whether or not the content is desirable and take
      appropriate action with respect to delivery, routing or rejection.
  
      Another possible use case is identity-based evaluation of web
      content using technologies such as the DKIM-derived DOSETA
      (work in progress).
  
      This working group will produce specifications (targeting the
      standards track, though the working group will determine the
      appropriate status) for:
  
         * the detailed requirements for reporting
  
         * an end-to-end system architecture in which reporting occurs
  
         * the mechanisms and formats for reporting
  
      Two mechanisms are under consideration:
  
         * simple -- a reputation is expressed in a simple manner,
                     via records in the DNS
                 (see draft-kucherawy-reputation-query-dns)
  
         * extended -- a response can contain more complex information
                   useful to an assessor, reported over HTTP using
                       an encoding such as XML or JSON
                   (see draft-kucherawy-reputation-query-http)
  
      The syntactic and semantic aspects of mechanisms and formats will be
      designed to be application-independent and portable (i.e., reputation
      provider-independent).  By distinguishing reporting information
      (format) from reporting mechanism (channel), the specifications
      will permit adaptation to support reporting through additional
      channels.  Limited application-specific tailoring will be
      provided for email, to demonstrate the approach, which can be
      applied for supporting additional applications.  The design and
      specification will also permit adaptation to support reporting
      through additional transport channels.
  
      Items that are specifically out of scope for this work:
  
         * Specific actions to be taken in response to a reputation reply.
           It is up to assessors (i.e., the consumers of reputation data)
           to determine this.  Non-normative illustrations, however, can
               be included to demonstrate possible uses of reputation data
           in a particular context.
  
         * Selection of what data might be valid as the subject of a
           reputation query.  It is up to reputation service providers and
           assessors to select which qualities of a body of data might
           be useful input to reputation evaluation.
  
         * Concerns about methods of verifying domain names that are used
           for email reputation.  A verified domain name is a starting point
           for this work; the means by which it was obtained and the
           "meaning" of the name or its verification are matters for
           discussion elsewhere.
  
         * Algorithms to be applied to aggregated feedback in order to
           compute reputations.  These are part of a back-end system, 
  usually
           proprietary, and not appropriate for specification as part of
           a query/reply framework and protocol.
  
      The initial draft set:
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-model
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-media-type
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-query-http
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-query-dns
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-query-udp
          draft-kucherawy-reputation-vocab-identity