IETF meets in San Jose, Dec 9-13; want to come?

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

The Internet Engineering Task Force will hold one of its thrice-yearly
meetings in San Jose in December, making it accessible to many
cypherpunks.  (The following two meetings will be April in Memphis,
and August in Munich.)

IETF sponsors working groups which propose new protocols and
procedures to evolve the Internet technology and infrastructure.  Many
of these working groups are of interest to cypherpunks.  Working
groups are open to all interested parties and transact almost all of
their business by email.  An IETF meeting is a place where working
groups can meet and resolve issues that are hard to handle by email.
It's also a place for newcomers to the working groups to be introduced
to the issues and existing players.

An IETF meeting is not a standards committee meeting, nor is it a
technical conference.  It's a unique animal.  The working groups meet
in parallel sessions, usually several times per meeting.  Participants
are encouraged to submit any large publications by email before the
meeting, so that they can be intelligently discussed, rather than
merely read, at the meeting.  There is little or no voting, and few or
no "papers".  The working groups run by "rough consensus and running
code" -- a method near and dear to the cypherpunk credo.

There's a whole Security Area with these working groups:

aft	Authenticated Firewall Traversal 
cat	Common Authentication Technology
dnssec	Domain Name System Security
ipsec	IP Security Protocol
otp	One Time Password Authentication
pkix	Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509)
tls	Transport Layer Security
wts	Web Transaction Security

I'm actively working with the DNSSEC and IPSEC groups, on my S/WAN project.

In addition there are lots of other interesting working groups for
Mobile IP, Web evolution, MIME and email security, IPv6, Dynamic DNS
update, etc.  All of these have security implications.

For more information about any of this, see www.ietf.org.  You'll find
full info about the upcoming meeting, as well as minutes from past
meetings, working group charters and web pages, archives of working
group email lists, more info than you'll be able to read.  Many
working group sessions are multicast on the MBone for those who can't
travel to participate, and there is excellent Internet access
available on-site, with acres of terminals, printers, and
laptop-plugins.

Attending the meeting will cost $250 if postmarked before Nov 8.
Non-local c'punks who wish to attend, but who can't afford to stay in
a hotel, can probably find other c'punks in the area to stay with.
(I'm in San Francisco, 50 miles from the meeting, so I'm not a good
candidate.)  

	John