Publications 

Full edition in PDF format

The full IETF Journal, Volume 2, issue 1 (Spring 2006) is available here for download in PDF format (338KB).

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF Celebrates 20th Anniversary

By Mirjam Kühne - Editor, IETF Journal

Congratulations, IETF, on 20 great years of Internet standards development!

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the IETF, many activities took place at the 65th IETF in Dallas, Texas, US. The IETF community has come a long way since its first meeting on 16th January 1986 in San Diego, California.

At IETF 65 participants could test their inside knowledge by answering a number of trivia questions. Every day, small prizes were handed out to the winners.

Celebrations reached a high point during the Social event (co-sponsored by ISOC and Nokia) at the IETF 65. Many participants from the very earliest days of the IETF were present, including a number of earlier IETF chairs. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

News from the IETF Chair

By Brian Carpenter, IETF Chair

As you will surely know, even if you didn’t experience it, IETF 65 in Dallas got off to something of a wet start, with flooding up to, and inside, the hotel on Sunday afternoon and evening. Thanks and congratulations are due to the NOC crew for relocating the NOC equipment to get away from the waterfalls from the light fixtures, with only a few minutes’s interruption to DHCP service. Nevertheless, a total of 1264 participants from about 36 countries attended despite the weather, for a busy week of WG meetings, birds-of-a-feather sessions, plenaries, and many other meetings and discussions, as well as a fine social event. I want to thank Nokia, the principal host, and other sponsors for helping to make the meeting such a success. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

News from the IAB Chair

By Leslie Daigle, IAB Chair

The first IETF meeting of each calendar year marks the transition between two “IAB years”, as some IAB members finish their terms and step down, and new IAB members join the group. On behalf of all the IAB, I’d like to thank the departing IAB members for their contributions and hard work:

• Patrik Fältström
• Bob Hinden
• Pekka Nikander (stepping down mid-term)
• Pete Resnick
• Jonathan Rosenberg

And I’d like to welcome the new folks who take their place:

• Elwyn Davies
• Kevin Fall
• Olaf Kolkman
• Dave Oran
• Dave Thaler

As I elaborated during the Thursday plenary session (and as reported here on page 9), the IAB is bringing a busy year to a close. For the IAB, a “busy year” involves acquitting its various administrative and oversight roles, as well as being active in key areas of technical contribution. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: Plenary Sessions

By Mirjam Kühne

Administrative Plenary

IETF chair opening

Brian Carpenter, the chair of IETF, welcomed everyone to the plenary. He presented attendees and document statistics (see Fact & Figures on page 2). This time some people had problems receiving their visa in time. Thanks to ISOC’s urgent intervention with the US State Department, this could be solved in most cases. It is still damaging to the IETF’s openness as Brian pointed out.

NOC and Host Report
Rich Osman, in charge for the NOC at the IETF this time, showed some network statistics. He thanked the many volunteers who helped during the week and did an especially good job, when the NOC had to be moved within 20 minutes on Sunday due to rain in the NOC.

Paul Murdock, representing Nokia, the host for IETF 65, gave a presentation showing some of Nokia’s latest multimedia developments.

IASA Report
The IASA Report consisted of four presentations:
- RFC Editor report (Bob Braden)
- IANA report (David Conrad)
- IASA operations report by the IAD (Ray Pelletier)
- IAOC general report: IAOC Chair (Lucy Lynch)

(more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: Tao of the IETF - Revised

By Susan Harris and Paul Hoffman

Newcomers to the IETF have long benefited from reading “The Tao of IETF - A Novice’s Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force” (FYI 17, RFC 3160). Thanks to original author Gary Malkin, the document covers the fundamentals of how the IETF works in a light, readable style. Reading the Tao sheds light on what happens at IETF meetings, how one can get involved, how the I-D/RFC publication process works, and the mechanics of holding and participating in Working Group meetings.

At the Dallas Operations and Administration plenary, co-authors Paul Hoffman (VPN Consortium, phoffman@imc.org) and Susan Harris (Merit, srh@merit.edu) announced that the Tao has undergone major revisions. The practical, “how-to” Working Group information has been greatly expanded, and text has been added about the IETF’s new administrative structure, new tools, and efforts such as the EDU team.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hoffman-taobis

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: RAI - a new area

Interview with new RAI Area Directors: Jon Peterson, Cullen Jennings, conducted by Mirjam Kühne

Recently a new IETF area has been created: Real-Time Applications and Infrastructure (RAI). We wanted to find out more about the motivation behind this decision and the scope of the new area.

Question: When was it decided to set up a new area?

Jon: Already 5 or 6 years ago people spoke about setting up an area that was focused on - what they then called telephony. At that time many people viewed it as this ‘container to put all this radioactive material into, so it cannot contaminate the rest of the IETF’ and therefore resisted that idea. Now the situation is quite different with SIP and similar technologies having gained a certain prominence in the industry. We are certainly generating enough documents and working groups and have enough visibility that it easily warrants its own area.

Cullen: It also reflects what is going on in the industry and as a result there are new people with new energy in this field. 2 WGs were moved out of Applications (simple and geopriv). The rest were moved from Transport. [Editor's note: a full list of RAI WGs is included at the end of this article]. The scope of things that we were trying to cover in the Transport area was diverging further apart. It was covering an incredible range. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: Internet Area

By Geoff Huston

[Editors Note: While the following report provides a high-level overview of all working groups in the Internet area, some of them are discussed in more detail in the reports following this one.]

In this article I’d like to provide a brief run-down of the status of those Working Groups in the Internet Area that met at IETF 65 in March 2006, looking at the major items of interest that the WG is focussed on.

This is not an official report, by the way, and I confess at the outset that I did not manage to attend all of these WG sessions at IETF 65. Much of the material here is based on the extensive reporting that the IETF produces, including the proceedings,
logs of text sessions and the audio archives of the meeting. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: IPv6 Host Mobility

By Wolfgang Fritsche and Gerardo Giaretta

Mobile communication is continuously becoming more and more important in our daily life. Consequently also an increasing number of IETF working groups are dealing with mobility aspects. In this field one could roughly distinguish between host mobility, network mobility and ad-hoc networks. This review focuses especially on IPv6 host mobility aspects discussed during the IETF 65 in March 2006. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

IETF 65 Review: Wireless

By James Kempf

Two new wireless-related working groups met for the first time during IETF 65:

1. NETLMM - working on a protocol for network-based, localized mobility management
2. EMU - working on an update of EAP-TLS to improve interoperability and bring it to standards track, standardization of an EAP method using shared keys, and an EAP method using password databases.

In addition, there were BOFs related to mobility and wireless:

1. 16NG (met for the second time) - discussing work needed by IEEE, WiMax, and WiBro to put IPv6 over 802.16e
2. HOAKEY - discussing work to standardize the EAP application key hierarchy for handover, backend AAA work for preauthentication, and AAA key distribution for services.

In this review, we will discuss two working groups that are about done with their charter deliverables: the MOBIKE WG and the 6LOWPAN WG. MOBIKE is in the Security Area and 6LOWPAN is in the Internet Area. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

The Evolution of an Internet Standard

By Geoff Huston

The IETF is, in effect, a standards making organization, and, like many other standards making organizations, it has a principle focus on the generation of "standard" specifications of technologies and their intended use. Obviously in the IETF’s case this focus lies with the Internet, and within that increasingly broad scope of activity, the IETF appears to specialize on aspects of the technical infrastructure of the network and the associated aspects of operational management. Of course this brief hand-waving summary of the IETF probably raises more questions than it answers - How are standards produced? How does the IETF decide that a topic is a suitable area for standards-related study? How does the process used by the IETF work? When is the process complete? (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

Interview with Lixia Zhang, Professor, Computer Science Department, UCLA, Member of the IAB

Question: Lixia, you attended the first IETF Meeting. How did you get involved in the IETF?

Lixia: I was at MIT working with Dave Clark. He was the first IAB chair from 1981 - 1989. That were exactly the same 8 years I was at MIT as his graduate student. There used to be a few meetings every year with the whole network team in the same room. As the community was growing large, around 1984 or so Dave Clark and Berry Leiner decided to break up to different groups. They were called Task Forces. I recall initially there were 10 Task Forces. Among the 10 one was called GADS (Gateway Algorithm and Data Structure), and Dave suggested that I participate in GADS. (more…)

Posted: Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

Interview with Steve Crocker, CEO of Shinkuro, Inc.

Steve Crocker is also a Trustee on ISOC’s Board of Trustees and Chair of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

It’s a pleasure to be here and to talk about the IETF on its 20th anniversary and to reflect on the IETF as an institution and the whole process of creating protocols.

My perspective is necessarily affected by having been part of the very earliest protocol design processes for the beginnings of the ARPA net. It was a deliberately unorganised process. There was no formal or official organisation to the process of designing the protocols or what the different labs would do with the network that was handed to them. (more…)

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Interview with Scott Bradner, University Technology Security Officer at Harvard University

Q: How did you get involved in the IETF and what was your first IETF meeting?

Scott: I knew Jeff Schiller at MIT for a number of years in conjunction with the NSF network and NEARnet (the regional NSF-connected network in the Boston area). He suggested I get involved in the IETF. I had never heard of it before. So, I got on some mailing lists and found it interesting. The first IETF I attended was at Tallahassee. The first WG meeting I attended at that IETF meeting was the DHCP WG. Ralph Droms was the chair. And I could go to one of their meetings this week. Ralph Droms is still the WG chair and the WG is still working on some of the same issues. (more…)

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Interview with Bob Hinden, Nokia Fellow

Question: Bob, you attended the first IETF Meeting. How did you get involved in the IETF?

Bob: I have been involved in this work even earlier. I started working for a company called Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) that designed, implemented and operated the ARPANET. I started working there in 1978. The ARPANET existed since 1969, so it was a fairly established packet switching network. I started as a programmer. BBN had built a multi-processor system called the Pluribus and I did a lot of software development for that which was also used on the ARPANET. (more…)

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Interview with Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Masters Public Policy and Computer Science at Univ. of Maryland, Newcomer at the IETF

Question: Why did you attend the IETF and how did you find out about it?

Jessy: I knew about the IETF before and I found about this meeting through my interest in interplanetary Internet and deep space communications. It turns out that this topic is being pursued under the delay-tolerant networking research group and they were meeting here this time. It happened to overlap with my university break.

Question: What are you studying?

Jessy: I am doing a masters in public policy and I am also taking courses in Computer Science and would possibly like to do a PHD in Computer Science. I have also a grade in astrophysics and math and I am actually interested in seeing the technical side of things. (more…)

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Interview with Mike St.Johnes, Director Network Implementation Strategies, Nominet

Question: John, you attended the first IETF Meeting. How did you get involved in the IETF?
Mike: In 1986 my boss was Mike Corrigan, who was the first chair of the IETF. I was working on the Defense Data Network Program along with Phill Gross. I was responsible for managing the development of the packet switches, the gateways and the terminal servers for the DDN (Defense Data Network). So, I saw this note about GADS (Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures) meeting in San Diego and decided to go.

The meeting had been going on for half a day and we look up and Mike Corrigan wanders in. Mike had just come from the Internet Architecture Board Meeting where they decided to turn it into something different: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). So, Dave Mills, the chair of GADS, ended up as the chairman of Internet Architecture Task Force and Mike Corrigan would take over the Internet Engineering Task Force.

The original mission of the IETF was engineering. It was to look at what we were calling the Internet which consisted of the following networks:

- Milnet (the military version of the ARPANET),
- ARPANET,
- the core gateway system,
- Nasa Science Internet (NSI),
- National Science Foundation (NSF) net

So, the original IETF was really a place for NASA, the Department of Energy, DOD and the NSF to talk with each other about how to build networks.

With Mike Corrigan as the chair of the IETF, I ended up being one of the program chairs for the first one or two meetings together with Phill Gross until Mike departed and Phill took over as IETF chair.

Question: What other functions did you have on the IETF?

Mike: I was on the IAB twice. I was on the first IAB after the Kobe meeting. And I was on the IAB two years ago.

And I was a WG chair for 4 or 5 WGs. I have been a NomCom chair once. I was actually on the NomCom that filled 17 slots which was difficult to do. That was also the NomCom that was charged to rationalise when people’s terms ended. And we ended up having to find an Area Director (AD) for Operations & Management three times for various reasons.

Question: looking back, what do you see as fundamentally different now?

Mike: The IETF is a a standards body. Parts of the problem I am seeing today is that process gets in the way of technology. I am not really sure how to fix that except by screening at the entry point and then killing groups that don’t do the work. But it is hard to do.

Question: You said the was initially not set up or designed as a standards organisations?

Mike: No. The IETF up until meeting 8 or 9, was plenary only. There were technical presentations about what was going on on the Internet. There were no workings groups. We organised the WG structure between Austin and Hawaii. By Hawaii Phill had created the area structure that is in place today. He appointed a steering group, being responsible for various parts of the system. At the Boulder meeting we were having some interesting discussions with Jon Postel about the ability to create our own documents. We really wanted to be able to create documents and Jon wanted the RFC system to continue as it was (as the documents describing the standards). The IETF had created a document series called IDEAS (Internet Design Engineering Analysis Series. We published about 11 of them before Phill went off and had a long chat with Jon. The result was the beginning of the Internet-Drafts system.

Question: What do you think will be the next big development on the Internet?

Mike: one of the things about the Internet is that it was designed to be used by experts. We have gone from a benign environment where we knew everyone who is on the Internet to an environment where we have cyber-stalkers and cyber-terrorists. It is a different world. The web has changed things. I think for the good, because lots of people can get their voice out, but part of it is that we are diluting the truth. For instance, you used to be able to pick up the newspaper and say ‘Oh, I believe that’, because you trusted the newspaper etc. But there is so much stuff on the Internet, that gets picked up.

Do you know what is meant by meme (A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another; dictionary.reference.com). It is a memory element. It is an idea. It is an idea that can spread from person to person. Urban legends are one example of it. Polls are another example of it. Belief systems, religions. The Internet is the best system for spreading memes that we have ever seen.

Before it would be newspaper and books and fiction etc. Now we have an idea popping up in Idaho and showing up in Berlin the next day. So, we need a way of inoculating ourselves against memes, against non-benign memes. So, it may be that the next thing for the Internet isn’t so much the protocols and standards, but the theory of information
transfer.

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Interview with Wouter Wijngaards, developer at NLnetLabs, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Newcomer at the IETF

Question: Why did you attend the IETF and how did you find out about it?

Wouter: I am working for NLnetLabs and my boss told me the IETF is a place where a lot of DNS-related topics are being discussed. So, I wanted to find out what is going on in this area.

Question: Is DNS your main area of expertise?

Wouter: Yes, I attended all the DNS-related WGs: dns-ops, dns-ext. And WGs that deal with protocols that use the DNS for different purposes (e.g. hip, shim6, some other v6 related WGs). It was interesting to sit in those WGs, but I could better follow the discussions at the DNS WGs, because I had actually read all the current documents. (more…)

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Calendar

Summer 2006 - 66th IETF
July 9-14, 2006
Host: Ericsson
Location: Montreal, Canada

Autumn 2006 - 67th IETF
November 5-10, 2006
Host: TBD
Location TBD

Spring 2007 - 68th IETF
March 18-23, 2007
Host: TBD
Location: TBD

Summer 2007 - 69th IETF
July 22-27, 2007
Host: TBD
Location: TBD

Autumn 2007 - 70th IETF
December 2-7, 2007
Host: TBD
Location: TBD

Posted: Wednesday, May 31st, 2006