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