| Sadly, a similar myth/fallacy persists about the Wikipedia consensus process (at least the English project and others deriving policy from it.) Participants in disputes and RFCs literally call their comments “!vote” in true hacker notation, to repeatedly and clearly emphasize that “vote count” is never a factor in the process of establishing consensus. (Elections are, however, regularly held, and votes counted, for positions such as Administrator, and the ArbCom seats, but that’s for people, not article content.) |
| From the way DJB talks about IETF processes, it's quite clear to me though that he has little trust/belief in the IETF consensus process. I thought he said as much somewhere but can't find that right now. (It's particularly obvious in https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260405-votes.html) Which is why I'm noting the alienation of "IETF believers", which I should maybe clarify I count myself as. The IETF is a lot of people doing a lot of good work. It does include a bunch of questionable actors, anything from ignorant, incompetent, ulterior motives, to outright malicious. But all in all it has brought us the internet as it exists today and I can't help feeling a little, well, alienated by DJB's writs. [ed.:] https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement says: Anyway, IETF hasn't attempted to issue such a rule. On the contrary, IETF claims that WG decisions are not taken by voting: "Decisions within WGs, as with the broader IETF, are taken by 'rough consensus' and not by voting." This begs the question of what IETF thinks "rough consensus" means. Letting chairs make arbitrary decisions is a violation of due process. More to the point, IETF can't override the definition of "consensus" in the law. That definition requires general agreement. Adoption of this draft was controversial, and didn't reach general agreement. DJB making legal-ish arguments (or the idea that the IETF could be sued over a definition of "rough consensus") is absolutely inane to me. The choice of words of the IETF in defining its own processes for itself is not a legal one. And apart from that, which country's laws would that be? (I'm also quite skeptical about such a definition existing in a relevant manner to begin with.) |
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| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent | next [-] | | He famously doesn't support the IETF. In the long-long-long ago, back when I had a "home page" with my username and a tilde in it, I used to have a quote from him on it about the IETF and "ego standards". He's been picking fights like this with different IETF working groups for basically his entire career. This isn't even the first time he's picked a huge fight with IETF cryptography groups; he managed to get Kenny Paterson to publicly take him to task on the CFRG a few years back. I, too, don't support the IETF (hence the quote on the web page, which I can't find now). But I happen to know enough about the people involved in this particular drama that I can see through his arguments here, and whether he realizes it or not, he's operating in supremely bad faith this time. | | |
| ▲ | eqvinox a day ago | parent [-] | | > whether he realizes it or not, he's operating in supremely bad faith this time. I've met him in person, once, at a CCC event about a decade ago, and as someone clueless about cryptography all I can say to that is that he certainly had (has?) a my-way-or-the-highway personality. > I, too, don't support the IETF Out of curiosity, how would you maintain e.g. TLS? Something more academic? Raw "throw it all out there, best-wins"? Another SDO (e.g. ITU)? Other more formal international processes? | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | For the record, he's always been extremely nice to me, online and in person, and generous with his time. I would maintain TLS the same way WireGuard and OpenSSH are maintained. Both have superior track records. I'm generally an opponent of all security and (especially) cryptographic standards bodies. | | |
| ▲ | eqvinox a day ago | parent [-] | | > I would maintain TLS the same way WireGuard and OpenSSH are maintained. Both have superior track records. I'm generally an opponent of all security and (especially) cryptographic standards bodies. Hmm. This doesn't entirely connect for me… WireGuard and OpenSSH are first and foremost implementations. Are you implying people should follow a "primary" implementation? Does WireGuard even have a protocol specification? (searches - ah, yes, it does. I do know there have been a very number of "further" implementations [e.g. on FreeBSD], though I'm not sure if they're derivative or clean-room.) But then isn't this just replacing IETF processes with whatever community or corporate processes those projects have? Wouldn't that just be "get shit into {the Linux kernel,OpenBSD}"? They've gotten better but both of those communities have their shortcomings. (For Linux, it's not the social interactions anymore, at this point it's the significant corporate interests.) | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | WireGuard in particular is both an implementation and a design, and the design effectively belongs to Jason Donenfeld. The problem with cryptographic standards bodies is that committee-based design has a long track record of weakening protocols. Originally, part of the ethos of the IETF was that it was merely providing interop for things that were already happening; rough consensus around real implementations. But that attitude expired decades ago; things are now designed de novo in working groups. Through a herculean effort, TLS-WG managed through that fucked process to drastically improve TLS in 1.3. It did that in part because a team of cryptographers and cryptography engineers camped on the working group and made sure the outcome was sane. And they nearly failed! Banks fought hard to try to keep static handshakes in the new version, so they could do compliance intercepts. Unfortunately, fully documenting PQC cryptography isn't as glamorous a task as defining the next generation's version of TLS. And yet, we've got a somewhat diverse team of cryptographers on the working group lined up against Bernstein on this. |
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| ▲ | csande17 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | He makes the legal argument in more detail in https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#standards The gist of it is that standards organizations like the IETF depend on a specific carve-out in US antitrust law (in order for it to be legal for American companies like Cisco and Google to participate in them), and that carve-out includes a specific definition of what "standards organizations" and "consensus" are. So even if the IETF uses different words to describe its processes, those processes still have to comply with the legal definition that separates a "standards organization" from, like, an illegal cartel. | | |
| ▲ | eqvinox a day ago | parent [-] | | I can't help but note two things: * the IETF's approach predates 15 U.S.C. §4302 by more than a decade * every single case example cited is US-American scoped¹ SDOs: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, National Fire Protection Association, American
National Standards Institute² ¹ NB scope ≠ legal domicile. The IETF's legal status is… complicated… but does have US dependencies. Its scope is world-wide though. Not so for any of the mentioned entities, even if… ² …ANSI is a borderline case since it is the constituent ISO member. But still, it's the US entity. I'm not trying to make a legal argument here, but… I'll say he shouldn't be trying to do that either. Most mathematicians and CS majors make very poor lawyers in any case, and often enough without any awareness of it. |
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