Web4 Federation Policy Advertisement

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.¶

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.¶

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A federation MUST provide a stable discovery mechanism that distinguishes active, superseded, withdrawn, and unavailable policies.¶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

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.¶

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/>.