Minutes interim-2019-iab-21 2019-07-25
minutes-interim-2019-iab-21-20190725-00

Minutes of the 2019-07-25 IAB Business Meeting, Montreal

0. Attendance

Present:

• Jari Arkko
• Alissa Cooper (IETF Chair)
• Stephen Farrell
• Wes Hardaker
• Ted Hardie (IAB Chair)
• Christian Huitema
• Mirja Kühlewind (IESG Liaison)
• Zhenbin Li
• Cindy Morgan (IAB Executive Administrative Manager)
• Mark Nottingham
• Karen O’Donoghue (ISOC Liaison)
• Colin Perkins (IRTF Chair)
• Melinda Shore
• Jeff Tantsura
• Martin Thomson
• Brian Trammell

Regrets:

• Erik Nordmark

Guests:

• Christopher Wood (Privacy Enhancements and Assessments RG Chair)
• Sara Dickinson (Privacy Enhancements and Assessments RG Chair) (via WebEx)
• Shivan Sahib (Privacy Enhancements and Assessments RG Chair)

1. IRTF Review: Privacy Enhancements and Assessments RG

The chairs of the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments RG (PEARG) joined the IAB to give an update on the RG’s activities.

PEARG has the following goals:

1. Bring Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) from the academic world and open source community to the IRTF and IETF for discussion
2. Document old and new research on PETS as a stable reference for the rest of the IRTF and IETF
3. Provide a forum for discussion and analysis of the cryptographic and practical aspects of privacy protocols
4. Provide a forum for IETF WGs to come for privacy-oriented advice

PEARG currently has one adopted draft and four candidate drafts:

Adopted drafts:

• Guidelines for Performing Safe Measurement on the Internet, draft-irtf-pearg-safe-internet-measurement

Potential Candidates:

• A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques, draft-hall-censorship-tech
• On the Generation of Transient Numeric Identifiers, draft-gont-numeric-ids-generation
• Enabling Network Traffic Obfuscation – Pluggable Transports, draft-oliver-pluggable-transports
• Network-Based Website fingerprinting, draft-wood-privsec-wfattacks

Emerging themes include surveys of research and existing practices, privacy assessment methodologies, experimental network system and protocol design, and privacy-preserving advisory and best practice recommendations. Shivan Sahib noted that the RG does not want to provide prescriptive reviews; they want people to come to them for reviews.

The chairs noted several things that are working well:

• Bridging theory and practice
  • Focus on research presentations a la MAPRG raises awareness of work outside of the IRTF and IETF field of view
• Documenting research
  • Encourage long-form documents surveying research in PETs, e.g., censorship evasion, anonymity systems, and website fingerprinting.
• Discussing experimental work
  • Privacy Pass, Pluggable Transports, etc.
  • All of which might benefit from experimental documents describing how they work.
• IETF engagement
  • Getting people from outside the IETF/IRTF involved by actively reaching out to researchers and open source developers
  • Invited OTR folks to PEARG, which resulted in them being involved in the MLS effort

Christopher Wood noted a few areas where things could be improved:

• Inreach to IETF groups working on privacy-impacting protocols; PEARG has not yet been requested to help with privacy assessments
• Exploring ways for the face-to-face meetings to be more engaging and interactive
• Funding model for researchers to come speak at IRTF meetings
• Immutable RFC medium not always appropriate for surveys and other rapidly changing documents

Christopher Wood noted that there is some concern about overlapping with the Security Directorate on privacy assessments. Christian Huitema asked if there was any overlap between the two groups. Christopher replied that there was some; Christian noted that might be something to encourage and suggested making a presentation in SAAG about it.

Christopher Wood said that PEARG should be looking to evolve their assessment methodologies to provide guidelines and expertise to improve the way privacy assessments are done in the IETF and IAB. They should also look for overlap with other IRTF groups and mailing lists focused on privacy (e.g. work in MAPRG on IP address anonymization).

Christopher Wood noted that PEARG plans to ramp up the collaboration with academic research conferences like PETS, NDSS, and USENIX.

2. Follow up from plenary

Ted Hardie sent text for a message to the community reflecting on the discussion from the IAB open mic session at the IETF 105 plenary and asked the IAB to review it so that the message could be sent out by the end of the day.

Stephen Farrell asked what the timeline was for deciding whether to proceed with the RFP for the RFC Series Editor. Ted Hardie replied that the original plan was for the RFP to go out by mid-August.

The current plan is to issue the RFP unless consensus emerges in the discussion with the community to not fill the position while the RFC Editor Model is under discussion. The search committee will be chosen by RSOC.

3. Update the IAB Job Description based on community feedback

The IAB agreed on the text for the IAB job description that is provided to NomCom. Martin Thomson will send it to the NomCom Chair.

4. Put the Privsec and Stackevo programs to bed

The IAB agreed to close the IP Stack Evolution Program and the Privacy & Security Program.

Brian Trammell will send a message to architecture-discuss regarding the closure of the IP Stack Evolution Program.

Martin Thomson will send a message to architecture-discuss regarding the closure of the Privacy & Security Program.

5. draft-thomson-use-it-or-lose-it

Martin Thomson will upload a new revision of draft-thomson-use-it-or-lose-it with a draft-iab- filename.

6. IAB Meeting Cadence

The IAB discussed changing the frequency of their meetings. Jari Arkko will put together an updated proposal for changing the cadence of IAB meetings and send it out to the IAB for review.