Web4 Federation Policy Advertisement
draft-jacobs-web4-federation-policy-00

Internet Engineering Task Force                                T. Jacobs
Internet-Draft                                                KTS Global
Intended status: Experimental                          12 September 2026
Expires: 16 March 2027

                  Web4 Federation Policy Advertisement
                 draft-jacobs-web4-federation-policy-00

Abstract

   This document defines machine-readable advertisements for federation
   policies, including authority, versions, profiles, evidence formats,
   retention, challenges, appeals, revocation, disclosure, jurisdiction,
   proof, and status.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 16 March 2027.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Conventions and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Policy Advertisement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   4.  Required Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   5.  Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   6.  Versioning  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   7.  Protected Internals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   8.  Conformance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   9.  Relationship to Research Artifacts  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   11. Privacy Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   12. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   13. Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   14. Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5

1.  Conventions and Terminology

   The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”,
   “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and
   “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

2.  Introduction

   This document defines machine-readable Federation Policy
   Advertisements while keeping governance engines, rankings, private
   graphs, and internal deliberations out of scope.

3.  Policy Advertisement

   An advertisement MUST identify the policy, version, accountable
   authority, effective time, supported profiles, recognized formats,
   status mechanism, and integrity proof.

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   {
     "policy_id": "urn:web4:policy:federation:example:v1",
     "issuer_id": "did:example:federation-authority",
     "effective_from": "2026-09-12T13:59:00Z",
     "supported_profiles": ["urn:web4:profile:assessment:v1"],
     "retention_policy": "urn:example:retention:class-2",
     "challenge_uri": "https://policy.example/challenge",
     "status_uri": "https://status.example/policies/example-v1",
     "proof": {
       "type": "ExampleProof",
       "verification_method": "did:example:federation-authority#key-1",
       "value": "BASE64URL-SIGNATURE"
     }
   }

4.  Required Declarations

   A policy MUST state admission-criteria categories, assurance
   profiles, evidence retention, challenge and appeal procedures,
   suspension and revocation, disclosure and minimization, applicable
   jurisdiction, and supported versions when applicable.

5.  Discovery

   A federation MUST provide a stable discovery mechanism that
   distinguishes active, superseded, withdrawn, and unavailable
   policies.

6.  Versioning

   Material semantic changes MUST produce a new version.  Enough history
   MUST be retained to identify the policy governing past decisions.

7.  Protected Internals

   Conformance does not require publication of eligibility scores,
   admission rankings, private risk vectors, internal graph
   relationships, optimization, deliberations, routing, or control-plane
   data.

8.  Conformance

   A conforming federation publishes truthful, versioned, integrity-
   protected declarations.  Publication alone does not prove operator
   behavior.

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9.  Relationship to Research Artifacts

   Broader Web4 architectural work is described informatively in
   [I-D.reilly-web4].  Informative research materials MAY be published
   as versioned scholarly artifacts, including DOI-addressable records.

   A research artifact is not required for conformance unless expressly
   incorporated as a Normative Reference by a named profile.
   Referencing or verifying an artifact does not establish the truth of
   its conclusions, regulatory approval, certification, security, legal
   compliance, or IETF endorsement.

   A Conforming Implementation MUST NOT require access to KCoordinate,
   KQAS, or another protected internal assessment method unless a
   separate deployment agreement selects that implementation.

10.  Security Considerations

   Implementations MUST authenticate issuers, validate proof integrity,
   check proof purpose, enforce temporal validity, and resolve current
   status before relying on an object.

   Implementations MUST address identifier confusion, issuer
   impersonation, key compromise, algorithm downgrade, replay, stale
   status, unauthorized supersession, cross-policy confusion,
   canonicalization ambiguity, denial of service, and fail-open handling
   of indeterminate validity.

   Evidence commitments can confirm correspondence with committed bytes
   but do not prove truth, completeness, legality, provenance, or
   fitness for purpose.  Profiles SHOULD define privacy-preserving
   commitment procedures for low-entropy artifacts.

   Verifiers MUST bind decisions to the exact policy identifier and
   version named by the relevant object.

11.  Privacy Considerations

   Persistent identifiers, status queries, proofs, policy references,
   and linked receipts can enable correlation.  Implementations MUST
   minimize disclosed data and SHOULD use unlinkable or pairwise
   identifiers where they satisfy policy.

   Private evidence MAY remain undisclosed and be represented by a
   cryptographic commitment.  Retention and erasure requirements MUST be
   specified by policy and account for applicable obligations.

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12.  IANA Considerations

   This document requests no IANA actions.

13.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

14.  Informative References

   [I-D.reilly-web4]
              Reilly, L. J., "Web4: A Verifiable, Agent-Native
              Architecture for the World Wide Web", Work in Progress,
              Internet-Draft, draft-reilly-web4-00, 26 August 2026,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-reilly-web4/>.

Author's Address

   Tim Jacobs
   KTS Global
   United Arab Emirates
   Email: tim@ktsglobal.live

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