IETF April 2022 Monthly Report

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In our IETF series, we have contributions from David Oliver of Guardian Project. David has attended several IETF meetings, learning about new protocols that can help advance Pluggable Transports work and benefit censorship circumvention developers.

April 2022 Monthly Report

By David Oliver of Guardian Project - [email protected]

MASQUE

The MASQUE Working Group reached consensus on both HTTP/3 Datagrams and Connect-UDP during April, allowing higher-level review of these drafts before publication as Recommendations. This is a major milestone since these two protocols represent the core of the modern MASQUE ideas (together, allow proxying of both QUIC and IP datagrams over HTTP connections). The Connect-IP draft will complete the vision: proxying of all types of IP-based traffic of HTTP/3 (QUIC).

As we’ve said in our previous reports, we still hold out hope for HTTP Transport Authentication, though the draft has currently expired. The foremost reason for this is that the author is now on the IETF’s Architecture Board and chairs two other working groups.

A new MASQUE-related draft was created related to finding services in a MASQUE environment - HTTP Access Service Description Objects. This draft describes how to find a MASQUE server if (1) software is starting with an HTTP CONNECT proxy or (2) use of multiple services in combination (e.g. CONNECT-UDP + CONNECT-IP + DoH + …) is required. According to the author, the design could also serve as a building block for a solution to the key consistency problem in Oblivious HTTP, described in Key Consistency for Oblivious HTTP by Double-Checking.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS)

The MLS Working Group submitted its call for consensus on draft #14 of the MLS protocol document on May 3, 2022. While this will likely get some “editorial” commentary, it appears the technical content of this draft is ready for recommendation to IETF as a standard.

A potential blocker: one of the Working Group chairs filed an Intellectual Property Rights disclosure (as procedure requires) on the protocol draft. The WG will have to deal with this in list discussion or in an interim meeting, and come up with a formal resolution/response if the draft is to proceed.

A virtual interim meeting on the protocol draft is scheduled for June 2, 2022.

Privacy Pass

Two updated drafts have been released:

  1. draft-ietf-privacypass-protocol-04.txt and
  2. draft-ietf-privacypass-architecture-03.txt

Mailing list discussion indicates there is still considerable work to do in both areas, however Apple updated its draft Privacy Pass HTTP Authentication Scheme (such a scheme is required for client interaction with the Privacy Pass protocol). Does this seek to standardize work Apple has already experimented with in its iCloud Private Relay? Pure speculation.

A new draft was submitted relating to work - discussed at IETF113 - on rate limiting. Rate-Limited Token Issuance Protocol.

Oblivious HTTP (now Oblivious HTTP Application Intermediation, OHAI)

As above, a new draft (Key Consistency for Oblivious HTTP by Double-Checking) was submitted to the OHAI working group after IETF113 discussion about the relationship between key consistency and key discovery. The author felt it is natural to combine discovery and consistency-checking, this draft exploring how that could work. Note that this technique relies on the Oblivious Proxy also being a MASQUE server, so that the client can fetch the KeyConfig from both the proxy (providing consistency) and the origin (providing authenticity). Interesting aggregation of technologies. This draft will provide room for debate on at least some of the key-related issues in OHAI.

The core OHAI draft has not advanced further this month.

Privacy Preserving Measurement (PPM)

After what was thought to be a thorough (but many felt confusing) presentation on PPM at IETF113, and an update to the original draft submitted mid-month, a yet-newer draft has been submitted by the principals: Distributed Aggregation Protocol for Privacy Preserving Measurement to replace those original submissions, after a lengthy discussion on the mailing list. There is clearly a long way to go on this effort - the overall trust model not being well understood nor (as a constituent problem) authentication between parties.

IETF114

IETF has announced that IETF114 will go forward as planned in Philadelphia PA, July 25-29 2022 with the Hackathon running July 23-24. I will attend both events.