What’s new at the IETF?#

Paresh Khatri, Nokia (delivered with Warren Kumari, Dhruv Dhody, and Suresh Krishnan, IAB)

• Why: The standards radar this cycle is unusually relevant: three of the newly chartered working groups touch attestation, bot/agent authentication, and PKI — squarely in identity territory — alongside routing and ops topics.
• What: New WGs: Secure Evidence and Attestation Transport (SEAT), Domain Connection (DCONN), Open Cloud Mesh (OCM), Web Bot Auth (WEBBOTAUTH), and PKI, Logs, And Tree Signatures (PLANTS); Authenticated Transfer (ATP) in chartering. BoFs at IETF 125: CATALIST (coordinating AI agent-to-agent communications work) and ONSEN (operationalizing service abstractions). Also reports the IAB workshop on IP address geolocation concluding that IP is a weak, overloaded geolocation signal (anycast, satellite, overlays) — a useful data point for anyone building location-dependent policy.
• How: An operator-oriented survey of IETF structure (areas, ~125 WGs, IRTF, IAB) and where the new work landed, aimed at helping operators track what will hit their networks.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable; for this reader, WEBBOTAUTH and CATALIST are the items to watch for agentic/workload identity, and SEAT/PLANTS for attestation-transport plumbing.