WIMSE Architecture#

WIMSE WG presentation on draft-ietf-wimse-arch-06 (no Internet-Draft linked to the slides)

• Why: WIMSE is the IETF's umbrella for workload identity — the standards track that SPIFFE-adjacent interests will land on. This presentation is the WG's open-issues snapshot.
• What: Status of the architecture document after an interim: pending refactors of the service-to-service and identifier documents, terminology alignment, and an explicit list of topics to expand — security considerations, authorization, binding, key management, and attestation. The WG also refined its workload definition (PR#96): an independently addressable, executable software entity — microservices, containers, VMs, serverless functions — spanning fraction-of-a-second request handlers to multi-year database services and ML training jobs.
• How: The architecture coordinates WIMSE's credential formats (WITs), protocols, and attestation work; the "topics to expand" list is effectively the WG's current risk register — authorization and binding are where the hard problems now sit.
• Where applicable: Cloud-native service meshes broadly, not org-specific. WG work in progress; the interesting signal here is direction (authorization/key management next), not new mechanism.