Internet DRAFT - draft-huitema-rfc-eval-project
draft-huitema-rfc-eval-project
Network Working Group C. Huitema
Internet-Draft Private Octopus Inc.
Intended status: Informational October 25, 2020
Expires: April 28, 2021
Evaluation of a Sample of RFC Produced in 2018
draft-huitema-rfc-eval-project-07
Abstract
This document presents the author's effort to understand the delays
involved in publishing an idea in the IETF or through the Independent
Stream, from the first individual draft to the publication of the
RFC. We analyze a set of randomly chosen RFC approved in 2018,
looking for history and delays. We also use two randomly chosen sets
of RFC published in 2008 and 1998 for comparing delays seen in 2018
to those observed 10 or 20 years ago. The average RFC in the 2018
sample was produced in 3 years and 4 months, of which 2 years and 10
months were spent in the Working Group, 3 to 4 months for IETF
consensus and IESG review, and 3 to 4 months in RFC production. The
main variation in RFC production delays comes from the AUTH-48 phase.
We also measure the number of citations of the chosen RFC using
Semantic Scholar, and compare citation counts with what we know about
deployment. We show that citation counts indicate academic interest,
but correlate only loosely with deployment or usage of the
specifications. Counting web references could complement that.
The RFCs selected for this survey were chosen at random and represent
a small sample of all RFCs produced, and only approximately 10% of
the RFCs produced in each of 1998, 2008, and 2018. It is possible
that different samples would produce different results. Furthermore,
the conclusions drawn from the observations made in this document
represent the author's opinions and do not have consensus of the
IETF.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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This Internet-Draft will expire on April 28, 2021.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Defining the Important Milestones . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2. Selecting a Random Sample of RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. Analysis of 20 Selected RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1. 8411 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2. 8456 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3. 8446 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.4. 8355 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.5. 8441 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.6. 8324 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.7. 8377 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.8. 8498 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.9. 8479 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.10. 8453 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.11. 8429 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.12. 8312 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.13. 8492 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.14. 8378 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.15. 8361 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.16. 8472 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.17. 8471 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.18. 8466 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.19. 8362 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
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3.20. 8468 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4. Analysis of Process and Delays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.1. First Draft to RFC Delays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.2. Working Group Processing Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.3. Preparation and Publication Delays . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.4. Copy Editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.5. Independent Stream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5. Citation Counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.1. Citation Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.2. Comparison to 1998 and 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.3. Citations Versus Deployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
5.4. Citations Versus Web References . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
6. Observations and Next Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
10. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1. Introduction
As stated on the organization's web site, "The IETF is a large open
international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and
researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture
and the smooth operation of the Internet." The specifications
produced by the IETF are published in the RFC series, along with
independent submissions, research papers and IAB documents. In this
memo, the author attempts to understand the delays involved in
publishing an idea in the IETF or through the Independent Stream,
from the first individual draft to the publication of the RFC. This
is an individual effort, and the author's conclusions presented here
are personal. There was no attempt to seek IETF consensus.
The IETF keeps records of documents and process actions in the IETF
datatracker [TRKR]. The IETF datatracker provides information about
RFCs and drafts, from which we can infer statistics about the
production system. We can measure how long it takes to drive a
proposition from initial draft to final publication, and how these
delays can be split between Working Group discussions, IETF reviews,
IESG assessment, RFC Editor delays and final reviews by the authors -
or, for Independent Stream RFCs, draft production, reviews by the
Independent Stream Editor, conflict reviews, RFC Editor delays and
final reviews. Tracker data is available for all RFCs, not just IETF
stream RFCs.
Just measuring production delays may be misleading. If the IETF or
the editors of the other series simply rubber-stamped draft proposals
and published them, the delays would be short but the quality and
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impact might suffer. We hope that most of the RFC that are published
are useful, but we need a way to measure that usefulness. We try to
do that by measuring the number of references of the published RFCs
in Semantic Scholar [SSCH], and also by asking the authors of each
RFC in the sample whether the protocols and technologies defined in
the RFCs were implemented and used on the Internet. The citations
measured by the Semantic Scholar include citations in other RFCs and
in Internet drafts. We also measure the number of references on the
web, which provides some results but would be hard to automate.
In order to limit the resource required for this study, we selected
at random 20 RFCs published in 2018, as explained in Section 2.2.
The statistical sampling picked both IETF stream and Independent
Stream documents. For comparison purposes, we also selected at
random 20 RFC published in 1998 and 20 published in 2008. Limiting
the sample to 20 out of 209 RFCs published in 2018 allows for in
depth analysis of each RFC, but readers should be reminded that the
this is a small sample. The sample is too small to apply general
statistical techniques and quantify specific ratios, and discussions
of correlation techniques would be inappropriate. Instead, the
purpose is to identify trends, spot issues and document future work.
The information gathered for every RFC in the sample is presented in
Section 3. In Section 4 we analyze the production process and the
sources of delays, comparing the 2018 sample to the selected samples
for 1998 and 2018. In Section 5.1 we present citation counts for the
RFCs in the samples, and analyze whether citation counts could be
used to evaluate the quality of RFCs.
The measurement of delays could be automated by processing dates and
events recorded in the datatracker. The measurement of published
RFCs could be complemented by statistics on abandoned drafts, which
would measure the efficiency of the IETF triaging process. More
instrumentation would help understanding how large delays happen
during Working Group processes. These potential next steps are
developed in Section 6.
2. Methodology
The study reported here started with a simple idea: take a sample of
RFCs, and perform an in-depth analysis of the path from the first
presentation of the idea to its publication, while also trying to
access the success of the resulting specification. This requires
defining the key milestones that we want to track, and drawing a
random sample using an unbiased process.
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2.1. Defining the Important Milestones
The IETF datatracker records a list of events for each document
processed by IETF Working Groups. This has a high granularity, and
also a high variability. Most documents start life as an individual
draft, are adopted by a Working Group, undergo a Working Group last
call, are submitted to the IESG, undergo an IETF last call and an
IESG review, get eventually approved by the IESG, and are processed
for publication by the RFC Editor, but there are exceptions. Some
documents are first submitted to one Working Group and then moved to
another. Some documents are published through the Independent
Stream, and are submitted to the Independent Stream Editor instead of
the IESG.
In order to simplify tabulation, we break the delay from between the
submission of the first draft and the publication of the RFC in three
big components:
o The Working Group processing time, from the first draft to the
start of the IETF last call;
o The IETF processing time, which lasts from the beginning of the
IETF last call to the approval by the IESG, including the reviews
by various directorates;
o The RFC production, from approval by the IESG to publication,
including the AUTH-48 reviews.
For submissions to the Independent Stream, we don't have a Working
Group. We consider instead the progression of the individual draft
until the adoption by the ISE as the equivalent of the "Working
Group" period, and the delay from adoption by the ISE until
submission to the RFC Editor as the equivalent of the IETF delay.
We measure the staring point of the process using the date of
submission of the first draft listed on that RFC page in the IETF
datatracker. In most case, this first draft is an individual draft
that then resubmitted as a Working Group draft, or maybe resubmitted
with a new name as the draft was searching for a home in an IETF
Working Group, or before deciding for submission on the Independent
Stream.
The IETF datatracker entries for RFCs and drafts do not list Working
Group events like Working Group Last Call. The only intermediate
event that we list between the first draft and the submission to the
IESG is the Working Group Adoption. For that, we use the date of
submission of the version 00 of the draft eventually published as
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RFC. We use the same definition for drafts submitted to the
Independent Stream.
2.2. Selecting a Random Sample of RFCs
Basic production mechanisms could be evaluated by processing data
from the IETF datatracker, but subjective data requires manual
assessment of results, which can be time consuming. Since our
resources are limited, we will only perform this analysis for a small
sample of RFCs, selected at random from the list of RFCs approved in
2018. Specifically, we will pick 20 RFC numbers at random between:
o RFC 8307, published in January 2018, and
o RFC 8511, published December 2018.
The list of 20 selected RFCs is: RFC 8411, RFC 8456, RFC 8446, RFC
8355, RFC 8441, RFC 8324, RFC 8377, RFC 8498, RFC 8479, RFC 8453, RFC
8429, RFC 8312, RFC 8492 , RFC 8378, RFC 8361, RFC 8472, RFC 8471,
RFC 8466, RFC 8362, and RFC 8468.
When evaluating delays and impact, we will compare the year 2018 to
2008 and 1998, 10 and 20 years ago. To drive this comparison, we
pick 20 RFCs at random among those published in 2008, and another 20
among those published in 1998.
The list of the 20 randomly selected RFCs from 2008 is: RFC 5227, RFC
5174, RFC 5172, RFC 5354, RFC 5195, RFC 5236, RFC 5348, RFC 5281, RFC
5186, RFC 5326, RFC 5277, RFC 5373, RFC 5404, RFC 5329, RFC 5283, RFC
5358, RFC 5142, RFC 5271, RFC 5349, and RFC 5301.
The list of the 20 randomly selected RFCs from 2008 is: RFC 2431, RFC
2381, RFC 2387, RFC 2348, RFC 2391, RFC 2267, RFC 2312, RFC 2448, RFC
2374, RFC 2398, RFC 2283, RFC 2382, RFC 2289, RFC 2282, RFC 2404, RFC
2449, RFC 2317, RFC 2394, RFC 2297, and RFC 2323.
3. Analysis of 20 Selected RFCs
We review each of the RFCs listed in Section 2.2 for the year 2018,
trying both to answer the known questions and to gather insight for
further analyzes. In many cases, the analysis of the data is
complemented by direct feedback from the RFC authors.
3.1. 8411
IANA Registration for the Cryptographic Algorithm Object Identifier
Range [RFC8411]:
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Informational, 5 pages
4 drafts (personal), first 2017-05-08.
Last call announced 2017-10-09
IESG evaluation starts 2017-12-28
Approved 2018-02-26, draft 03
AUTH-48 2018-04-20
AUTH-48 complete 2018-07-17
Published 2018-08-06
IANA action: create table
This RFC was published from the individual draft, which was not
resubmitted as a Working Group draft.
The draft underwent minor copy edit before publication.
Some but not all of the long delay in AUTH-48 is due to clustering
with [RFC8410]. MISSREF was cleared on 2018-05-09 and the document
re-entered AUTH-48 at once. AUTH-48 lasted over two months after
that.
The time after AUTH-48 and before publication (3 weeks) partly
overlaps with travel for IETF-102 and is partly due to coordinating
the cluster.
3.2. 8456
Benchmarking Methodology for Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Controller Performance [RFC8456]:
Informational, 64 pages
2 personal drafts, 9 WG drafts, first 2015-03-23
WG adoption on 2015-10-18
Last call announced 2018-01-19
IESG evaluation starts 2018-02-27
IESG approved 2018-05-25
AUTH-48 2018-08-31
AUTH-48 complete 2018-10-16
Published 2018-10-30
The draft underwent very extensive copy editing, covering use of
articles, turn of phrases, choice of vocabulary. The changes are
enough to cause pagination differences. The "diff" tool marks pretty
much every page as changed. Some diagrams see change in protocol
elements like message names.
According to the author, the experience of producing this draft
mirrors a typical one in the Benchmarking Methodologies Working Group
(BMWG). There were multiple authors in multiple time zones, which
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slowed down the AUTH-48 process somewhat, although the AUTH-48 delay
of 46 days is only a bit longer than the average draft.
The RFC was part of cluster with [RFC8455].
BMWG publishes informational RFCs centered around benchmarking, and
the methodologies in RFC 8456 have been implemented in benchmarking
products.
3.3. 8446
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3 [RFC8446], as
the title indicates, defines the new version of the TLS protocol.
From the IETF datatracker, we extract the following:
Proposed standard
160 pages
29 WG drafts first 2014-04-17.
Last call announced 2018-02-15
IESG evaluation starts 2018-03-02
Approved 2018-03-21, draft 28
AUTH-48 2018-06-14
AUTH-48 complete 2018-08-10
Published 2018-08-10
This draft started as a WG effort.
The RFC was a major effort in the IETF. Working Group members
developed and tested several implementations. Researchers analyzed
the specifications and performed formal verifications. Deployment
tests outlined issues that caused extra work when the specification
was almost ready. These complexity largely explains the time spent
in the Working Group.
Comparing the final draft to the published version, we find
relatively light copy editing. It includes explaining acronyms on
first use, clarifying some definitions standardizing punctiation and
capitalization, and spelling out some numbers in text. This
generally fall in the category of "style", although some of the
clarifications go into message definitions. However, that simple
analysis does not explain why the AUTH-48 phase took almost two
months.
This document's AUTH-48 process was part of the "Github experiment",
which tried to use github pull requests to track the AUTH-48 changes
and review comments. The RPC staff had to learn using Github for
that process, and this required more work than the usual RFC. Author
and AD thoroughly reviewed each proposed edit, accepting some and
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rejecting some. The concern there was that any change in a complex
specification might affect a protocol that was extensively reviewed
in the Working Group, but of course these reviews added time to the
AUTH-48 delays.
There are 21 implementations listed in the Wiki of the TLS 1.3
project [TLS13IMP]. It has been deployed on major browsers, and is
already used in a large fraction of TLS connections.
3.4. 8355
Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING)
Networks [RFC8355] is an informational RFC. It originated from a use
case informational draft that was mostly used for the BOF creating
the WG, and then to drive initial work/evolutions from the WG.
Informational, 13 pages.
2 personal drafts (personal), first 2014-01-31. 13 WG drafts.
WG adoption on 2014-05-13
Last call announced 2017-04-20
IESG evaluation starts 2017-05-04, draft 09
Approved 2017-12-19, draft 12
AUTH-48 2018-03-12
AUTH-48 complete 2018-03-27
Published 2018-03-28
Minor set of copy edits, mostly for style.
No implementation of the RFC itself, but the technology behind it
such as Segment Routing (architecture RFC 8402, TI-LFA draft-ietf-
rtgwg-segment-routing-ti-lfa) is widely implemented and deployment is
ongoing.
According to participants in the discussion, the process of adoption
of the source packet routing standards was very contentious. The
establishment of consensus at both the Working Group level and the
IETF level was difficult and time consuming.
3.5. 8441
Bootstrapping WebSockets with HTTP/2 [RFC8441]
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Proposed standard, 8 pages. Updates RFC 6455.
3 personal drafts (personal), first 2017-10-15. 8 WG drafts.
WG adoption on 2017-12-19
Last call announced 2018-05-07, draft 05
IESG evaluation starts 2018-05-29, draft 06
Approved 2018-06-07, draft 07
AUTH-48 2018-08-13
AUTH-48 complete 2018-09-15
Published 2018-09-21
IANA Action: table entries
This RFC defines the support of WebSockets in HTTP/2, which is
different from the mechanism defined for HTTP/1.1 in [RFC6455]. The
process was relatively straightforward, involving the usual type of
discussions, some on details and some on important points.
Comparing final draft and published RFC shows a minor set of copy
edit, mostly for style. However, the author recalls a painful
process. The RFC includes many charts and graphs that were very
difficult to format correctly in the author's production process that
involve conversions from markdown to XML, and then from XML to text.
The author had to get substantial help from the RFC editor.
There are several implementations, including Firefox and Chrome,
making RFC 8441 a very successful specification.
3.6. 8324
DNS Privacy, Authorization, Special Uses, Encoding, Characters,
Matching, and Root Structure: Time for Another Look? [RFC8324].
This is an opinion piece on DNS development, published on the
Independent Stream.
Informational, 29 pages. Independent Stream.
5 personal drafts (personal), first 2017-06-02.
ISE review started 2017-07-10, draft 03
IETF conflict review and IESG review started 2017-10-29
Approved 2017-12-18, draft 04
AUTH-48 2018-01-29, draft 05
AUTH-48 complete 2018-02-26
Published 2018-02-27
This RFC took only 9 months from first draft to publication, which is
the shortest in the 2018 sample set. In part, this is because the
text was privately circulated and reviewed by ISE designated experts
before the first draft was published. The nature of the document is
another reason for the short delay. It is an opinion piece, and does
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not require the same type of consensus building and reviews than a
protocol specification.
Comparing the final draft and the published version shows only minor
copy edit, mostly for style. According to the author, because this
is because he knows how to write in RFC Style with the result that
his documents often need a minimum of editing. He also makes sure
that the document on which the Production Center starts working
already has changes discussed and approved during Last Call and IESG
review incorporated rather than expecting the Production Center to
operate off of notes about changed to be made.
3.7. 8377
Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL): Multi-Topology
[RFC8377]
Proposed standard, 20 pages. Updates RFC 6325, 7177.
3 personal drafts (personal), first 2013-09-03. 7 WG drafts.
WG adoption on 2015-09-01
Last call announced 2018-02-19, draft 05
IESG evaluation starts 2018-03-02, draft 06
Approved 2018-03-12, draft 05
AUTH-48 2018-04-20, draft 06
AUTH-48 complete 2018-07-31
Published 2018-07-31
IANA Table, table entries
Minor set of copy edits, mostly for style, also clarity.
3.8. 8498
A P-Served-User Header Field Parameter for an Originating Call
Diversion (CDIV) Session Case in the Session Initiation Protocol
(SIP) [RFC8498].
Informational, 15 pages.
5 personal drafts (personal), first 2016-03-21. 9 WG drafts.
WG adoption on 2017-05-15
Last call announced 2018-10-12, draft 05
IESG evaluation starts 2018-11-28, draft 07
Approved 2018-12-10, draft 08
AUTH-48 2019-01-28
AUTH-48 complete 2019-02-13
Published 2019-02-15
IANA Action, table rows added.
Copy edit for style, but also clarification of ambiguous sentences.
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3.9. 8479
Storing Validation Parameters in PKCS#8 [RFC8479]
Informational, 8 pages. Independent Stream.
5 personal drafts (personal), first 2017-08-08.
ISE review started 2018-12-10, draft 00
IETF conflict review and IESG review started 2018-03-29
Approved 2018-08-20, draft 03
AUTH-48 2018-09-20, draft 04
AUTH-48 complete 2018-09-25
Published 2018-09-26
The goal of the draft was to document what the gnutls implementation
was using for storing provably generated RSA keys. This is a short
RFC that was published relatively quickly, although discussion
between the author, the Independent Series Editor and the IESG lasted
several months. In the initial conflict review, The IESG asked the
ISE to not publish this document before IETF Working Groups had an
opportunity to pick up the work. The author met that requirement by
a presentation to the SECDISPATCH WG in IETF 102. Since no WG was
interested in pickup the work, the document progressed on the
Independent Stream.
Very minor set of copy edit, moving some references from normative to
informative.
The author is not aware of other implementations than gnutls relying
on this RFC.
3.10. 8453
Framework for Abstraction and Control of TE Networks (ACTN) [RFC8453]
Informational, 42 pages.
3 personal drafts, first 2015-06-15. 16 WG drafts.
WG adoption on 2016-07-15
Out of WG 2018-01-26, draft 11
Expert review requested, 2018-02-13
Last call announced 2018-04-16, draft 13
IESG evaluation starts 2018-05-16, draft 14
Approved 2018-06-01, draft 15
AUTH-48 2018-08-13
AUTH-48 complete 2018-08-20
Published 2018-08-20
IANA Action, table rows added.
Minor copy editing.
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3.11. 8429
Deprecate Triple-DES (3DES) and RC4 in Kerberos [RFC8429]
BCP, 10 pages.
6 WG drafts, first 2017-05-01.
Last call announced 2017-07-16, draft 03
IESG evaluation starts 2017-08-18, draft 04
Approved 2018-05-25, draft 05
AUTH-48 2018-07-24
AUTH-48 complete 2018-10-31
Published 2018-10-31
IANA Action, table rows added.
This draft started as a Working Group effort.
This RFC recommends to deprecate two encryption algorithms that are
now considered obsolete and possibly broken. The document was sent
back to the WG after the first last call, edited, and then there was
a second last call. The delay from first draft to Working Group last
call was relatively short, but the number may be misleading. The
initial draft was a replacement of a similar draft in the KITTEN
Working Group, which stagnated for some time before the CURDLE
Working Group took up the work. The deprecation of RC4 was somewhat
contentious, but the WG had already debated this prior to the
production of this draft, and the draft was not delayed by this
debate.
Most of the 280 days between IETF LC and IESG approval was because
the IESG had to talk about whether this document should obsolete or
move to historic RFC 4757, and no one was really actively pushing
that discussion for a while.
The 99 days in AUTH-48 are mostly because one of the authors was a
sitting AD, and those duties ended up taking precedence over
reviewing this document.
Minor copy editing, for style.
The implementation of the draft would be the actual removal of
support for 3DES and RC4 in major implementations. This is
happening, but very slowly.
3.12. 8312
CUBIC for Fast Long-Distance Networks [RFC8312]
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Informational, 18 pages.
2 personal drafts, first 2014-09-01. 8 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2015-06-08
Last call announced 2017-09-18, draft 06
IESG evaluation starts 2017-11-14
Approved 2017-10-04, draft 07
AUTH-48 2018-01-08
AUTH-48 complete 2018-02-07
Published 2018-02-07
IANA Action, table rows added.
Minor copy editing, for style.
The TCP congestion control algorithm Cubic was defined first in 2005,
was implemented in Linux soon after, and was implemented in major
OSes after that. After some debates from 2015 to 2015, the TCPM
Working Group adopted the draft, with a goal of documenting Cubic in
the RFc series. According to the authors, this was not a high
priority effort, as Cubic was already implemented in multiple OSes
and documented in research papers. At some point, only one of the
authors was actively working on the draft. Ths may explain why
another two years was spent progressing the draft after adoption by
the WG.
The RFC publication may or may not have triggered further
implementations. On the other hand, several OSes picked up bug fixes
from the draft and the RFC.
3.13. 8492
Secure Password Ciphersuites for Transport Layer Security (TLS)
[RFC8492]
Informational, 40 pages. (Independent Stream)
10 personal drafts, first 2012-09-07. 8 WG drafts
Targeted to ISE stream 2016-08-05
ISE review started 2017-05-10, draft 01
IETF conflict review and IESG review started 2017-09-04
Approved 2017-10-29, draft 04
AUTH-48 2018-10-19, draft 05
AUTH-48 complete 2019-02-19
Published 2019-02-21
IANA Action, table rows added.
This RFC has a complex history. The first individual draft was
submitted to the TLS Working Group on September 7, 2012. It
progressed there, and was adopted by the WG after 3 revisions. There
were then 8 revisions in the TLS WG, until the WG decided to not
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progress it. The draft was parked in 2013 by the WG chairs after
failing to get consensus in WG last call. The AD finally pulled the
plug in 2016, and the draft was then resubmitted to the ISE.
At that point, the author was busy and was treating this RFC with a
low priority because, in his words, it would not be a "real RFC".
There were problems with the draft that only came up late. In
particular, it had to wait for a change in registry policy that only
came about with the publication of TLS 1.3, which caused the draft to
only be published after RFC 8446, and also required adding references
to TLS 1.3. The author also got a very late comment while in AUTH-48
that caused some rewrite. Finally, there was some IANA issue with
the extension registry where a similar extension was added by someone
else. The draft was changed to just use it.
Changes in AUTH-48 include added reference to TLS 1.3, copy-editing
for style, some added requirements, added paragraphs, and changes in
algorithms specification.
3.14. 8378
Signal-Free Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) Multicast [RFC8378]
is an experimental RFC, defining how to implement Multicast in the
LISP architecture.
Experimental, 21 pages.
5 personal drafts, first 2014-02-28. 10 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2015-12-21
Last call announced 2018-02-13, draft 07
IESG evaluation starts 2018-02-28, draft 08
Approved 2018-03-12, draft 09
AUTH-48 2018-04-23
AUTH-48 complete 2018-05-02
Published 2018-05-02
Preparing the RFC took more than 4 years. According to the authors,
they were not aggressive pushing it and just let the Working Group
process decide to pace it. They also did implementations during that
time.
Minor copy editing, for style.
The RFC was implemented by lispers.net and cisco, and was used in
doing IPv6 multicast over IPv4 unicast/multicast at the Olympics in
PyeungChang. The plan is to work on a proposedstandard once the
experiment concludes.
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3.15. 8361
Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL): Centralized
Replication for Active-Active Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, and
Multicast (BUM) Traffic [RFC8361]
Proposed Standard, 17 pages.
3 personal drafts, first 2013-11-12. 14 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2014-12-16
Last call announced 2017-11-28, draft 10
IESG evaluation starts 2017-12-18, draft 11
Approved 2018-01-29, draft 13
AUTH-48 2018-03-09
AUTH-48 complete 2018-04-09
Published 2018-04-12
According to the authors, the long delays in producing this RFC was
due to a slow uptake of the technology in the industry.
Minor copy editing, for style.
There was at least 1 partial implementation.
3.16. 8472
Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extension for Token Binding Protocol
Negotiation [RFC8472]
Proposed Standard, 8 pages.
1 personal drafts, 2015-05-29. 15 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2015-09-11
Last call announced 2017-11-13, draft 10
IESG evaluation starts 2018-03-19
Approved 2018-07-20, draft 14
AUTH-48 2018-09-17
AUTH-48 complete 2018-09-25
Published 2018-10-08
This is a pretty simple document, but it took over 3 years from
individual draft to RFC. According to the authors,the biggest
setbacks occurred at the start: it took a while to find a home for
this draft. It was presented in the TLS WG (because it's a TLS
extension) and UTA WG (because it has to do with applications using
TLS). Then the ADs determined that a new WG was needed, so the
authors had to work through the WG creation process, including
running a BOF.
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Minor copy editing, for style, with the addition of a reference to
TLS 1.3.
Perhaps partially due to the delays, some of the implementers lost
interest in supporting this RFC.
3.17. 8471
The Token Binding Protocol Version 1.0 [RFC8471]
Proposed Standard, 18 pages.
1 personal drafts, 2014-10-13. 19 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2015-03-15
Last call announced 2017-11-13, draft 16
IESG evaluation starts 2018-03-19
Approved 2018-07-20, draft 19
AUTH-48 2018-09-17
AUTH-48 complete 2018-09-25
Published 2018-10-08
Presentation of a Token Binding Protocol for TLS. We can notice a
delay of 5 months before adoption of the draft by the WG. That
explains in part the overall delay of almost 4 years from first draft
to publication.
Minor copy editing, for style.
The web references indicates adoption in multiple development
projects.
3.18. 8466
A YANG Data Model for Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) Service
Delivery [RFC8466]
Proposed Standard, 158 pages.
5 personal drafts, first 2016-09-01. 11 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2017-02-26
Last call announced 2018-02-21, draft 07
IESG evaluation starts 2018-03-14, draft 08
Approved 2018-06-25, draft 10
AUTH-48 2018-09-17
AUTH-48 complete 2018-10-09
Published 2018-10-12
Copy editing for style and clarity, with also corrections to the yang
model.
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3.19. 8362
OSPFv3 Link State Advertisement (LSA) Extensibility [RFC8362] is a
major extension to the OSPF protocol. It makes OSPFv3 fully
extensible.
Proposed Standard, 33 pages.
4 personal drafts, first 2013-02-17. 24 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2013-10-15
Last call announced 2017-12-19, draft 19
IESG evaluation starts 2018-01-18, draft 20
Approved 2018-01-29, draft 23
AUTH-48 2018-03-19
AUTH-48 complete 2018-03-30
Published 2018-04-03
The specification was first submitted as a personal draft in the IPv6
WG, then moved to the OSPF WG. The long delay of producing this RFC
is due to the complexity of the problem, and the need to wait for
implementations. It is a very important change to OSPF that makes
OSPFv3 fully extensible. Since it was a non-backward compatible
change, the developers started out with some very complex migration
scenarios but ended up with either legacy or extended OSPFv3 LSAs
within an OSPFv3 routing domain. The initial attempts to have a
hybrid mode of operation with both legacy and extended LSAs also
delayed implementation due to the complexity.
Copy editing for style and clarity.
This specification either was or will be implemented by all the
router vendors.
3.20. 8468
IPv4, IPv6, and IPv4-IPv6 Coexistence: Updates for the IP Performance
Metrics (IPPM) Framework [RFC8468].
Informational, 15 pages.
3 personal drafts, first 2015-08-06. 7 WG drafts
WG adoption on 2016-07-04
Last call announced 2018-04-11, draft 04
IESG evaluation starts 2018-05-24, draft 05
Approved 2018-07-10, draft 06
AUTH-48 2018-09-13
AUTH-48 complete 2018-11-05
Published 2018-11-14
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RFC8468 was somehow special in that there was not a technical reason/
interest that triggered it, but rather a formal requirement. While
writing RFC7312 the IP Performance Metrics Working Group (IPPM)
realized that RFC 2330, the IP Performance Metrics Framework
supported IPv4 only and explicitly excluded support for IPv6.
Nevertheless, people used the metrics that were defined on top of RFC
2330 (and, therefore, IPv4 only) for IPv6, too. Although the IPPM WG
agreed that the work was needed, the interest of IPPM attendees in
progressing (and reading/reviewing) the IPv6 draft was limited.
Resolving the IPv6 technical part was straight-forward, but
subsequently some people asked for a broader scope (topics like
header compression, 6lo, etc.) and it took some time to figure out
and later on convince people that these topics are out of scope. The
group also had to resolve contentious topics, for example how to
measure the processing of IPv6 extension headers, which is sometimes
non-standard.
The AUTH-48 delay for this draft was longer than average. According
to the authors, the main reasons include:
o Work-load and travel caused by busy-work-periods of all co-authors
o Time zone difference between co-authors and editor (at least US,
Europe, India, not considering travel)
o Editor proposing and committing some unacceptable modifications
that needed to be reverted
o Lengthy discussions on a new document title (required high effort
and took a long time, in particular reaching consensus between co-
authors and editor was time-consuming and involved the AD)
o Editor correctly identifying some nits (obsoleted personal
websites of co-authors) and co-authors attempting to fix them.
The differences between the final draft and the publish RFC show copy
editing for style and clarity, but do not account for the back and
forth between authors and editors mentioned by the authors.
4. Analysis of Process and Delays
We examine the 20 RFCs in the sample, measuring various
characteristics such as delay and citation counts, in an attempt to
identify patterns in the IETF processes.
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4.1. First Draft to RFC Delays
We look at the distribution of delays between the submission of the
first draft and the publication of the RFC, using the three big
milestones defined in Section 2.1: processing time in the Working
Group, IETF processing time, and publication delay. The following
table shows the delays for the 20 RFCs in the sample:
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+------+------------------+-------+---------+------+------+------+
| RFC | Status | Pages | Overall | WG | IETF | Edit |
+------+------------------+-------+---------+------+------+------+
| 8411 | Info | 5 | 455 | 154 | 140 | 161 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 64 | 1317 | 1033 | 126 | 158 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 160 | 1576 | 1400 | 34 | 142 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 13 | 1517 | 1175 | 243 | 99 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 8 | 341 | 204 | 31 | 106 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 29 | 270 | 38 | 161 | 71 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 8 | 1792 | 1630 | 21 | 141 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 15 | 1061 | 935 | 59 | 67 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 8 | 414 | 233 | 144 | 37 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 42 | 1162 | 1036 | 46 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 10 | 548 | 76 | 313 | 159 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 18 | 1255 | 1113 | 16 | 126 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 40 | 2358 | 1706 | 172 | 480 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 21 | 1524 | 1446 | 27 | 51 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 17 | 1612 | 1477 | 62 | 73 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 8 | 1228 | 899 | 249 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 18 | 1228 | 899 | 249 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 158 | 771 | 538 | 124 | 109 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 33 | 1871 | 1766 | 41 | 64 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 15 | 1196 | 979 | 90 | 127 |
| | | | | | | |
| | average | 35 | 1186 | 948 | 117 | 121 |
| | | | | | | |
| | average(not ISE) | 36 | 1217 | 999 | 110 | 107 |
+------+------------------+-------+---------+------+------+------+
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The average delay from first draft to publication is about 3 years
and 3 months, but this varies widely. Excluding the Independent
Stream submissions, the average delay from start to finish is 3 years
and 4 months, of which on average 2 years and 9 months are spent
getting consensus in the Working Group, and 3 to 4 months each for
IETF consensus and for RFC production.
The longest delay is found for [RFC8492], 6.5 years from start to
finish. This is however a very special case, a draft that was
prepared for the TLS Working Group and failed to reach consensus.
After that, it was resubmitted to the ISE, and incurred atypical
production delays.
On average, we see that 80% of the delay is incurred in WG
processing, 10% in IETF review, and 10% for edition and publication.
For IETF stream RFCs, it appears that the delays for informational
documents are slightly shorter than those for protocol
specifications, maybe six months shorter on average. However, there
are lots of differences between individual documents. The delays
range from less than a year to more than 5 years for protocol
specifications, and from a year and 3 months to a bit more than 4
years for informational documents.
We can compare the delays in the 2018 samples to those observed 10
years ago and 20 years before:
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+------------+--------+-------+-------+
| RFC (2008) | Status | Pages | Delay |
+------------+--------+-------+-------+
| 5326 | Exp | 54 | 1584 |
| | | | |
| 5348 | PS | 58 | 823 |
| | | | |
| 5281 | Info | 51 | 1308 |
| | | | |
| 5354 | Exp | 23 | 2315 |
| | | | |
| 5227 | PS | 21 | 2434 |
| | | | |
| 5329 | PS | 12 | 1980 |
| | | | |
| 5277 | PS | 35 | 912 |
| | | | |
| 5236 | ISE | 26 | 1947 |
| | | | |
| 5358 | BCP | 7 | 884 |
| | | | |
| 5271 | Info | 22 | 1066 |
| | | | |
| 5195 | PS | 10 | 974 |
| | | | |
| 5283 | PS | 12 | 1096 |
| | | | |
| 5186 | Info | 6 | 2253 |
| | | | |
| 5142 | PS | 13 | 1005 |
| | | | |
| 5373 | PS | 24 | 1249 |
| | | | |
| 5404 | PS | 27 | 214 |
| | | | |
| 5172 | PS | 7 | 305 |
| | | | |
| 5349 | Info | 10 | 1096 |
| | | | |
| 5301 | PS | 6 | 396 |
| | | | |
| 5174 | Info | 8 | 427 |
+------------+--------+-------+-------+
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+------------+--------+-------+---------+
| RFC (1998) | Status | Pages | Delay |
+------------+--------+-------+---------+
| 2289 | PS | 25 | 396 |
| | | | |
| 2267 | Info | 10 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 2317 | BCP | 10 | 485 |
| | | | |
| 2404 | PS | 7 | 488 |
| | | | |
| 2374 | PS | 12 | 289 |
| | | | |
| 2449 | PS | 19 | 273 |
| | | | |
| 2283 | PS | 9 | 153 |
| | | | |
| 2394 | Info | 6 | 365 |
| | | | |
| 2348 | DS | 5 | 699 |
| | | | |
| 2382 | Info | 30 | 396 |
| | | | |
| 2297 | ISE | 109 | 28 |
| | | | |
| 2381 | PS | 43 | 699 |
| | | | |
| 2312 | Info | 20 | 365 |
| | | | |
| 2387 | PS | 10 | 122 |
| | | | |
| 2398 | Info | 15 | 396 |
| | | | |
| 2391 | PS | 10 | 122 |
| | | | |
| 2431 | PS | 10 | 457 |
| | | | |
| 2282 | Info | 14 | 215 |
| | | | |
| 2323 | ISE | 5 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 2448 | ISE | 7 | 92 |
+------------+--------+-------+---------+
We can compare the median delay, and the delays observed by the
fastest and slowest quartiles in the three years:
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+------+-------------+--------+-------------+
| Year | Fastest 25% | Median | Slowest 25% |
+------+-------------+--------+-------------+
| 2018 | 604 | 1179 | 1522 |
| | | | |
| 2008 | 869 | 1081 | 1675 |
| | | | |
| 1998 | 169 | 365 | 442 |
+------+-------------+--------+-------------+
The IETF takes three to four times more times to produce an RFC in
2018 than it did in 1998, but about the same time as it did in 2008.
We can get a rough estimate of how this translates in term of "level
of attention" per RFC by comparing the number of participants in the
IETF meetings of 2018, 2008 and 1998 [IETFCOUNT] to the number of RFC
published these years [RFCYEAR].
+------+------+---------+---------+------+----------+---------------+
| Year | Nb | Spring | Summer | Fall | Average | Attendees/RFC |
| | RFC | P. | P. | | P. | |
+------+------+---------+---------+------+----------+---------------+
| 2018 | 208 | 1235 | 1078 | 879 | 1064 | 5.1 |
| | | | | | | |
| 2008 | 290 | 1128 | 1181 | 962 | 1090 | 3.8 |
| | | | | | | |
| 1998 | 234 | 1775 | 2106 | 1705 | 1862 | 9.0 |
+------+------+---------+---------+------+----------+---------------+
The last column in the table provides the ratio of average number of
participants by number of RFC produced. If the IETF was a
centralized organization, if all participants and documents were
equivalent, this ratio would be the number of participants dedicated
to produce an RFC on a given year. This is of course a completely
abstract figure because none of the hypotheses above is true, but it
still gives a vague indication of the "level of attention" applied to
documents. We see that this ratio has increased from 2008 to 2018,
as the number of participants was about the same for these two years
but the number of published RFCs decreased. However, that ratio was
much higher in 1998. The IETF had many more participants, and there
were probably many more eyes available to review any given draft. If
we applied the ratios of 1998, the IETF would be producing 119
documents in 2018 instead of 208.
4.2. Working Group Processing Time
The largest part of the delays is spent in the Working Groups, before
the draft is submitted to the IESG for IETF review. As mentioned in
Section 2.1, the only intermediate milestone that we can extract from
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the IETF datatracker is the date at which the document was adopted by
the Working Group, or targeted for independent submission. The
breakdown of the delays for the documents in our sample is:
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+------+---------+------+----------------+----------------+
| RFC | Status | WG | Until adoption | After adoption |
+------+---------+------+----------------+----------------+
| 8411 | Info | 154 | 0 | 154 |
| | | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 1033 | 209 | 824 |
| | | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 1400 | 0 | 1400 |
| | | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 1175 | 102 | 1073 |
| | | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 204 | 65 | 139 |
| | | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 38 | 0 | 38 |
| | | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 1630 | 728 | 902 |
| | | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 935 | 420 | 515 |
| | | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 233 | 0 | 233 |
| | | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 1036 | 396 | 640 |
| | | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 76 | 0 | 76 |
| | | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 1113 | 280 | 833 |
| | | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 1706 | 1428 | 278 |
| | | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 1446 | 661 | 785 |
| | | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 1477 | 399 | 1078 |
| | | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 899 | 105 | 794 |
| | | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 1127 | 153 | 794 |
| | | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 538 | 178 | 360 |
| | | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 1766 | 240 | 1526 |
| | | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 979 | 333 | 646 |
| | | | | |
| | Average | 948 | 285 | 663 |
+------+---------+------+----------------+----------------+
The time before Working Group adoption average to a bit more than 9
months, compared to 1 years and almost 10 months for processing time
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after adoption. We see that RFC 8492 stands out, with long delays
spent attempting publication through a Working Group before
submission to the Independent Stream Editor. If we removed RFC 8492
from the list, the average time until adoption drops to just over 7
months, and becomes just 25% of the total processing time in the WG.
There are a few documents that started immediately as Working Group
efforts, or were immediately targeted for publication in the
Independent Stream. Those documents tend to see short processing
times, with the exception of RFC 8446 on which the TLS Working Group
spent a long time working.
4.3. Preparation and Publication Delays
The preparation and publication delays include three components:
o the delay from submission to the RFC Editor to beginning of AUTH-
48, during which the document is prepared;
o the AUTH-48 delay, during which authors review and eventually
approve the changes proposed by the editors;
o the publication delay, from final agreement by authors and editors
to actual publication.
The breakdown of the publication delays for each RFC is shown in the
following table.
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+-------+---------+-------+--------+---------+--------+-------------+
| RFC | Status | Pages | RFC | AUTH-48 | RFC | Edit(total) |
| | | | edit | | Pub | |
+-------+---------+-------+--------+---------+--------+-------------+
| 8411 | Info | 5 | 53 | 88 | 20 | 161 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 64 | 98 | 46 | 14 | 158 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 160 | 85 | 57 | 0 | 142 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 13 | 83 | 15 | 1 | 99 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 8 | 67 | 33 | 6 | 106 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 29 | 42 | 28 | 1 | 71 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 8 | 39 | 102 | 0 | 141 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 15 | 49 | 16 | 2 | 67 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 8 | 31 | 5 | 1 | 37 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 42 | 73 | 7 | 0 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 10 | 60 | 99 | 0 | 159 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 18 | 96 | 30 | 0 | 126 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 40 | 355 | 123 | 2 | 480 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 21 | 42 | 9 | 0 | 51 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 17 | 39 | 31 | 3 | 73 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 8 | 59 | 8 | 13 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 18 | 59 | 8 | 13 | 80 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 158 | 84 | 22 | 3 | 109 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 33 | 49 | 11 | 4 | 64 |
| | | | | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 15 | 65 | 53 | 9 | 127 |
| | | | | | | |
| | Average | | 76 | 40 | 5 | 121 |
| | | | | | | |
| -8492 | Average | | 62 | 35 | 5 | 102 |
+-------+---------+-------+--------+---------+--------+-------------+
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On average, the total delay appears to be about four months, but the
average is skewed by the extreme values encountered for [RFC8492].
If we exclude that RFC from the computations, the average delay drops
to a just a bit more than 3 months: about 2 months for the
preparation, a bit more than one month for the AUTH-48 phase, and 5
days for the publishing.
Of course, these delays vary from RFC to RFC. To try explain the
causes of the delay, we compute the correlation factor between the
observed delays and several plausible explanation factors:
o The number of pages in the document,
o The amount of copy edit, as discussed in Section 4.4,
o Whether or not an IANA action was required,
o The number of authors,
o The number of drafts revisions,
o The Working Group delay.
We find the following values:
+-------------+----------+---------+-------------+
| Correlation | RFC edit | AUTH-48 | Edit(total) |
+-------------+----------+---------+-------------+
| Nb pages | 0.50 | -0.04 | 0.21 |
| | | | |
| Copy-Edit | 0.42 | 0.24 | 0.45 |
| | | | |
| IANA | -0.14 | -0.21 | 0.12 |
| | | | |
| Nb Authors | 0.39 | -0.07 | 0.18 |
| | | | |
| Nb drafts | 0.18 | -0.33 | -0.19 |
| | | | |
| WG delay | 0.03 | -0.16 | -0.15 |
+-------------+----------+---------+-------------+
We see some plausible explanations for the production delay. It will
be somewhat longer for longer documents, or for documents that
require a lot of copy editing (see Section 4.4). Somewhat
surprisingly, it also tend to increase with the number of authors.
It does not appear significantly correlated with the presence or
absence of IANA action.
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The analysis of RFC 8324 in Section 3.6 explains its short editing
delays by the experience of the author. This makes sense: if a
document needs less editing, the editing delays would be shorter.
This is partially confirmed by the relation between the amount of
copy editing and the publication delay.
We see fewer plausible explanations for the AUTH48 delays. These
delays vary much more than the preparation delay, with a standard
deviation of 20 days for AUTH-48 versus 10 days for the preparation
delay. In theory, AUTH-48 is just a final verification: the authors
receive the document prepared by the RFC production center, and just
have to give their approval, or maybe request a last minute
correction. The name indicates that this is expected to last just
two days, but in average it lasts more than a month.
We often hypothesize that the number of authors influences the
AUTH-48 delay, or that authors who have spent a long time working on
the document in the Working Group somehow get demotivated and spend
even longer to answer questions during AUTH-48. This may happen
sometimes, but our statistics don't show that - if anything, the
numerical results point in the opposite direction.
After asking the authors of the RFCs in the sample why the AUTH-48
phase took a long time, we got three explanations:
1- Some RFCs have multiple authors in multiple time zones. This
slows down the coordination required for approving changes.
2- Some authors found some of the proposed changes unnecessary or
undesirable, and asked that they be reversed. This required long
exchanges between authors and editors.
3- Some authors were not giving high priority to AUTH-48 responses.
As mentioned above, we were not able to verify these hypotheses by
looking at the data. The author's experience with this document
suggests another potential delay for the Independent Stream RFC:
processing delay by the Independent Stream Editor, discussed in
Section 4.5.
4.4. Copy Editing
We can assess the amount of copy editing applied to each published
RFC by comparing the text of the draft approved for publication and
the text of the RFC. We do expect differences in the "boilerplate"
and in the IANA section, but we will also see differences due to copy
editing. Assessing the amount of copy editing is subjective, and we
do it using a scale of 1 to 4:
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1- Minor editing
2- Editing for style, such as capitalization, hyphens, that versus
which, and expending all acronyms at least one.
3- Editing for clarity in addition to style, such as rewriting
ambiguous sentences and clarifying use of internal references. For
Yang models, that may include model corrections suggested by the
verifier.
4- Extensive editing.
The following table shows that about half of the RFCs required
editing for style, and the other half at least some editing for
clarity.
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+------+--------+-----------+
| RFC | Status | Copy Edit |
+------+--------+-----------+
| 8411 | Info | 2 |
| | | |
| 8456 | Info | 4 |
| | | |
| 8446 | PS | 3 |
| | | |
| 8355 | Info | 2 |
| | | |
| 8441 | PS | 2 |
| | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 2 |
| | | |
| 8377 | PS | 3 |
| | | |
| 8498 | Info | 3 |
| | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 1 |
| | | |
| 8453 | Info | 2 |
| | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 2 |
| | | |
| 8312 | Info | 2 |
| | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 3 |
| | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 2 |
| | | |
| 8361 | PS | 2 |
| | | |
| 8472 | PS | 2 |
| | | |
| 8471 | PS | 2 |
| | | |
| 8466 | PS | 3 |
| | | |
| 8362 | PS | 3 |
| | | |
| 8468 | Info | 3 |
+------+--------+-----------+
This method of assessment does not take into account the number of
changes proposed by the editors and eventually rejected by the
authors, since these changes are not present in either the final
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draft or the published RFC. It might be possible to get an
evaluation of these "phantom changes" from the RFC Production Center.
4.5. Independent Stream
Out of 20 randomly selected RFCs, 3 were published through the
Independent Stream. One is an independent opinion, another a
description of a non-IETF protocol format, and the third was
[RFC8492], which is a special case. Apart from this special case,
the publication delays were significantly shorter for the Independent
Stream than for the IETF stream.
The authors of these 3 RFCs are regular IETF contributors. This
observation motivated a secondary analysis of all the RFCs published
in the Independent Stream in 2018. There are 14 such RFCs: 8507,
8494, 8493, 8492, 8483, 8479, 8433, 8409, 8374, 8369, 8367, 8351,
8328 and 8324. (RFC 8367 and 8369 were published on 1 April 2018.)
The majority of the documents were published by regular IETF
participants, but two of them were not. One describes "The BagIt
File Packaging Format (V1.0)" [RFC8493], and the other the "Yeti DNS
Testbed" [RFC8483]. They document a data format and a system
developed outside the IETF, and illustrate the outreach function of
the Independent Stream. In both cases, the authors include one
experienced IETF participant, who presumably helped outsiders
navigate the publication process.
Th present document experienced some publication delays due to the
Independent Stream Editor. The ISE is a bottleneck and is a
volunteer resource. Although the ISE as a lone person operating as a
volunteer is still roughly adequate resource for the job, the
delivery will necessarily be best effort with delays caused by spikes
in ISE load, work commitments, and other life events. These delays
may not be fundamentally critical to RFC delivery, but they are
capable of introducing a significant percentage delay into what might
otherwise be a smooth process.
5. Citation Counts
In this exploration, we want to assess whether citation counts
provide a meaningful assessment of the popularity of RFCs. We obtain
the citation counts through the Semantic Scholar API, using queries
of the form:
http://api.semanticscholar.org/
v1/paper/10.17487/rfc8446?include_unknown_references=true
In these queries, the RFC is uniquely identified by its DOI
reference, which is composed of the RFC Series prefix 10.17487 and
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the RFC identifier. The queries return a series of properties,
including a list of citations for the RFC. Based on that list of
citations, we compute three numbers:
o The total number of citations
o The number of citations in the year of publication and the year
after that
o For the RFC published in 1998 or 2008 that we use for comparison,
the number of citations in the years 2018 and 2019.
All the numbers were retrieved on October 6, 2019.
5.1. Citation Numbers
As measured on October 6, 2019, the citation counts for the RFC in
our sample set were:
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+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+
| RFC(2018) | Status | Total | 2018-2019 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+
| 8411 | Info | 1 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 418 | 204 |
| | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 3 | 3 |
| | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 3 | 3 |
| | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 25 | 16 |
| | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 4 | 4 |
| | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 0 | 0 |
| | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 1 | 1 |
| | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 1 | 1 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+
The results indicate that [RFC8446] is by far the most cited of the
20 RFC in our sample. This is not surprising, since TLS is a key
Internet Protocol. The TLS 1.3 protocol was also the subject of
extensive studies by researchers, and thus was mentioned in a number
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of published papers. Surprisingly, the Semantic Scholar mentions a
number of citations that predate the publication date. These are
probably citations of the various draft versions of the protocol.
The next most cited RFC in the sample is [RFC8312] which describes
the Cubic congestion control algorithm for TCP. That protocol was
also the target of a large number of academic publications.The other
RFC in the sample only have a small number of citations.
There is probably a small bias when measuring citations at a fixed
date. An RFC published in January 2018 would have more time to
accrue citations than one published in December. That may be true to
some extent, as the second most cited RFC in the set was published in
January. However, the effect has to be limited. The most cited RFC
was published in August, and the second most cited was published in
2019. (That RFC got an RFC number in 2018, but publication was
slowed by long AUTH-48 delays.)
5.2. Comparison to 1998 and 2008
In order to get a baseline, we can look at the number of references
for the RFCs published in 2008 and 1998. However, we need totake
time into account. Documents published a long time ago are expected
to have accrued more references. We try to address this by looking
at three counts for each document: the overall number of references
over the document's lifetime, the number of references obtained in
the year following publication, and the number of references observed
since 2018:
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+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
| RFC(2008) | Status | Total | 2008-2009 | 2018-2019 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
| 5326 | Exp | 138 | 14 | 15 |
| | | | | |
| 5348 | PS | 14 | 3 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5281 | Info | 69 | 15 | 7 |
| | | | | |
| 5354 | Exp | 17 | 13 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5227 | PS | 19 | 1 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 5329 | PS | 24 | 6 | 1 |
| | | | | |
| 5277 | PS | 32 | 3 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 5236 | ISE | 25 | 5 | 4 |
| | | | | |
| 5358 | BCP | 21 | 2 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5271 | Info | 7 | 2 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5195 | PS | 7 | 4 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 5283 | PS | 8 | 1 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5186 | Info | 14 | 4 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 5142 | PS | 8 | 4 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5373 | PS | 5 | 2 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5404 | PS | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5172 | PS | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5349 | Info | 8 | 0 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 5301 | PS | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 5174 | Info | 0 | 0 | 0 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
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+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
| RFC(1998) | Status | Total | 1998-1999 | 2018-2019 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
| 2289 | PS | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| | | | | |
| 2267 | Info | 982 | 5 | 61 |
| | | | | |
| 2317 | BCP | 9 | 1 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 2404 | PS | 137 | 6 | 1 |
| | | | | |
| 2374 | PS | 42 | 4 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2449 | PS | 7 | 2 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2283 | PS | 17 | 3 | 2 |
| | | | | |
| 2394 | Info | 13 | 2 | 1 |
| | | | | |
| 2348 | DS | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2382 | Info | 17 | 12 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2297 | ISE | 36 | 11 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2381 | PS | 39 | 12 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2312 | Info | 14 | 3 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2387 | PS | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2398 | Info | 17 | 0 | 1 |
| | | | | |
| 2391 | PS | 31 | 3 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2431 | PS | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2282 | Info | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2323 | ISE | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| | | | | |
| 2448 | ISE | 0 | 0 | 0 |
+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+-----------+
We can compare the median number of citations and the numbers of
citations for the least and most popular quartiles in the three
years:
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+----------------------------+-----------+--------+------------+
| References | Lower 25% | Median | Higher 25% |
+----------------------------+-----------+--------+------------+
| RFC (2018) | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| | | | |
| RFC (2008) | 6.5 | 11 | 21.75 |
| | | | |
| RFC (2008), until 2009 | 1 | 2.5 | 4.5 |
| | | | |
| RFC (2008), 2018 and after | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| | | | |
| RFC (1998) | 4.75 | 13.5 | 32.25 |
| | | | |
| RFC (1998), until 1999 | 0 | 2 | 4.25 |
| | | | |
| RFC (1998), 2018 and after | 0 | 0 | 1 |
+----------------------------+-----------+--------+------------+
The total numbers show new documents with fewer citations than the
older ones. This can be explained to some degree by the passage of
time. If we restrict the analysis to the number of citations accrued
in the year of publishing and the year after that, we still see about
the same distribution for the three samples.
We also see that the number of references to RFC fades over time.
Only the most popular of the RFC produced in 1998 are still cited in
2019.
5.3. Citations Versus Deployments
The following table shows side by side the number of citations as
measured in Section 5.1 and the estimation of deployment as indicated
in Section 3.
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+-----------+--------+-----------+------------+
| RFC(2018) | Status | Citations | Deployment |
+-----------+--------+-----------+------------+
| 8411 | Info | 1 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 1 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 418 | high |
| | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 3 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 1 | high |
| | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 0 | N/A |
| | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 0 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 0 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 0 | one |
| | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 3 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 0 | some |
| | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 25 | high |
| | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 4 | one |
| | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 1 | some |
| | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 0 | one |
| | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 1 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 1 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 0 | unknown |
| | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 1 | medium |
| | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 1 | some |
+-----------+--------+-----------+------------+
From looking at these results, it is fairly obvious that citation
counts cannot be used as proxies for the "value" of an RFC. In our
sample, the two RFCs that have high citation counts were both widely
deployed, and can certainly be described as successful, but we also
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see many RFCs that saw significant deployment without garnering a
high level of citations.
Citation counts are driven by academic interest, but are only loosely
correlated with actual deployment. We saw that [RFC8446] was widely
cited in part because the standardization process involved many
researchers, and that the high citation count of [RFC8312] is largely
due to the academic interest in evaluating congestion control
protocols. If we look at previous years, the most cited RFC in the
2008 sample is [RFC5326], an experimental RFC defining security
extensions to an experimental delay tolerant transport protocol.
This protocol does not carry a significant proportion of Internet
traffic, but has been the object of a fair number of academic
studies.
The citation process tends to privilege the first expression of a
concept. We see that with the most cited RFC in the 1998 set is
[RFC2267], an informational RFC defining Network Ingress Filtering
that was obsoleted in May 2000 by [RFC2827]. It is still cited
frequently in 2018 and 2019, regardless of its formal status in the
RFC series. We see the same effect at work with [RFC8441], which
garners very few citations although it obsoletes [RFC6455] that has a
large number of citations. The same goes for [RFC8468], which is
sparsely cited while the [RFC2330] is widely cited. Just counting
citations will not indicate whether developers still use an old
specification or have adopted the revised RFC.
5.4. Citations Versus Web References
Web references might be another indicator of the popularity of an
RFC. In order to evaluate these references, we list here the number
of results returned by searches on Google and Bing, looking for the
search term "RFCnnnn" (e.g., RFC8411), and copying the number of
results returned by the search engines. The table below presents the
results of these searches, performed on April 4, 2020.
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+-----------+--------+-----------+--------+-------+
| RFC(2018) | Status | Citations | Google | Bing |
+-----------+--------+-----------+--------+-------+
| 8411 | Info | 1 | 301 | 94 |
| | | | | |
| 8456 | Info | 1 | 266 | 8456 |
| | | | | |
| 8446 | PS | 418 | 25900 | 47800 |
| | | | | |
| 8355 | Info | 3 | 521 | 114 |
| | | | | |
| 8441 | PS | 1 | 2430 | 59500 |
| | | | | |
| 8324 | ISE | 0 | 393 | 138 |
| | | | | |
| 8377 | PS | 0 | 264 | 10900 |
| | | | | |
| 8498 | Info | 0 | 335 | 10100 |
| | | | | |
| 8479 | ISE | 0 | 564 | 11000 |
| | | | | |
| 8453 | Info | 3 | 817 | 11400 |
| | | | | |
| 8429 | BCP | 0 | 391 | 41600 |
| | | | | |
| 8312 | Info | 25 | 1620 | 2820 |
| | | | | |
| 8492 | ISE | 4 | 323 | 9400 |
| | | | | |
| 8378 | Exp | 1 | 418 | 11600 |
| | | | | |
| 8361 | PS | 0 | 499 | 92 |
| | | | | |
| 8472 | PS | 1 | 496 | 169 |
| | | | | |
| 8471 | PS | 1 | 1510 | 11600 |
| | | | | |
| 8466 | PS | 0 | 766 | 173 |
| | | | | |
| 8362 | PS | 1 | 67 | 147 |
| | | | | |
| 8468 | Info | 1 | 453 | 127 |
+-----------+--------+-----------+--------+-------+
The results counts from Bing are sometimes surprising. Why would RFC
8441 gather 59,500 web references? Looking at the results in detail,
we find a mix of data. Some of them are logs of development projects
implementing Web Sockets, which is exactly what we are looking for,
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but others appear spurious. For example, a shop selling rugby
jerseys is listed because its phone number ends with "8441". Other
pages were listed because street numbers or product numbers matched
the RFC number. The same type of collision may explain the large
reference counts on Bing for RFC 8377, 8498, 8479, 8453, 8429, 8378,
and 8471. The result counts on Bing do not appear to provide a good
metric.
On Google, all RFC garner at least a 250 references, largely because
the whole RFC catalog is replicated on a large number of web servers.
Deviations from that base line are largely correlated with the number
of citations in the Semantic Scholar, with a couple of exception: RFC
8441, and 8471 garner more references than the low citation counts
would predict. Looking at the results, we find many references in
development databases explaining how these protocols are implemented
in various code bases and open source projects. This means that
counting Google results would give some indication about an RFC's
popularity, complementing the citation counts.
There are some practical problems in using the counts of Google
results. Google searches are personalized, the results depend on the
source of the queries, and the counts may vary as well. The search
result depend on the search algorithm, and there is no guarantee that
counts will not change when the algorithm changes. On the other
hand, the results do indicate that some of the RFC in our sample are
beeing used by developers or in deployments.
6. Observations and Next Steps
The author's goal was to get a personal understanding of the "chain
of production" of the RFCs, and in particular to look at the various
causes of delays in the process. As shown in Section 4, the average
RFC was produced in 3 years and 4 months, which is similar to what
was found in the 2008 sample, but more than three times larger than
the delays for the 1998 sample.
The Working Group process appears to be the main source of delays.
Efforts to diminish delays should probably focus there, instead of on
the IETF and IESG reviews of the RFC production. For the RFC
production phase, most of the variability originates in the AUTH-48
process, which is influenced by a variety of factors such as number
of authors or level of engagement of these authors.
Most of the delay is spent in the Working Group, but the IETF
datatracker does not hold much information about what happens inside
the Working Groups. For example, events like Working Group Last
Calls were not recorded in the history of the selected drafts
available in the datatracker. Such information would have been
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interesting. Of course, requiring that information would create an
administrative burden, so there is clearly a trade-off between
requiring more work from working group chairs and providing better
data for process analysis. (It appears that this information can be
available in the datatracker for more recent drafts, if the WG chairs
use the datatracker properly.)
The Independent Stream operates as expected. The majority of the
authors of the Independent Stream RFCs appear to be in IETF insiders,
but there is significant amount of engagement by outside parties.
The analysis of citations in Section 5.1 shows that citation numbers
are a very poor indication of the "value" of an RFC. Citation
numbers measure the engagement of academic researchers with specific
topics, but have little correlation with the level of adoption and
deployment of a specific RFC. The result counts of Google searches
do capture references outside academia, such as logs of development
projects. This might be informative, but it is not clear that the
counts would not change over time due to algorithm changes or
personaliztion.
This document analyses a small sample of RFCs "in depth". This
allowed gathering of detailed feedback on the process and the
deployments. On the other hand, much of the data on delays is
available from the IETF datatracker. It may be worth considering
adding an automated reporting of delay metrics in the IETF
datatracker.
This document only considers the RFCs that were published in a given
year. This approach can be criticized as introducing a form of
"survivor bias". There are many drafts proposed to the IETF, and
only a fraction of them end up being published as RFCs. On one hand
this is expected, because part of the process is to triage between
ideas that can gather consensus and those that don't. On the other
hand, we don't know whether that triage is too drastic and
discouraged progress on good ideas.
One way to evaluate the triage process would be to look at
publication attempts that were abandoned, for example drafts that
expired without progressing or being replaced. The sampling
methodology could also be used for that purpose. Pick maybe 20
drafts at random, among those abandoned in a target year, and
investigate why they were abandoned. Was it because better solutions
emerged in the Working Group? Or maybe because the authors
discovered a flaw in their proposal? Or was it because some
factional struggle blocked a good idea? Was the idea pursued in a
different venue? Hopefully, someone will try this kind of
investigation.
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7. Security Considerations
This draft does not specify any protocol.
We might want to analyze whether security issues were discovered
after publication of specific standards.
8. IANA Considerations
This draft does not require any IANA action.
Peliminary analysis does not indicate that IANA is causing any
particular delay in the RFC publication process.
9. Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the authors of the selected RFCs who were willing to
provide feedback on the process: Michael Ackermann, Zafar Ali, Sarah
Banks, Bruno Decraene, Lars Eggert, Nalini Elkins, Joachim Fabini,
Dino Farinacci, Clarence Filsfils, Sujay Gupta, Dan Harkins, Vinayak
Hegde, Benjamin Kaduk, John Klensin, Acee Lindem, Nikos
Mavrogiannopoulos, Patrick McManus, Victor Moreno, Al Morton, Andrei
Popov, Eric Rescorla, Michiko Short, Bhuvaneswaran Vengainathan, Lao
Weiguo, and Li Yizhou. Many thanks to Adrian Farrel for his useful
advice, to Stephen Farrell and Colin Perkins for their guidance on
the use of citations, and to Dave Crocker for a comprehensive review.
10. Informative References
[IETFCOUNT]
IETF, "Past IETF Meetings", 2020,
<https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/past/>.
[RFC2267] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
Address Spoofing", RFC 2267, DOI 10.17487/RFC2267, January
1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2267>.
[RFC2330] Paxson, V., Almes, G., Mahdavi, J., and M. Mathis,
"Framework for IP Performance Metrics", RFC 2330,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2330, May 1998,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2330>.
[RFC2827] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, DOI 10.17487/RFC2827,
May 2000, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2827>.
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[RFC5326] Ramadas, M., Burleigh, S., and S. Farrell, "Licklider
Transmission Protocol - Specification", RFC 5326,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5326, September 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5326>.
[RFC6455] Fette, I. and A. Melnikov, "The WebSocket Protocol",
RFC 6455, DOI 10.17487/RFC6455, December 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6455>.
[RFC8312] Rhee, I., Xu, L., Ha, S., Zimmermann, A., Eggert, L., and
R. Scheffenegger, "CUBIC for Fast Long-Distance Networks",
RFC 8312, DOI 10.17487/RFC8312, February 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8312>.
[RFC8324] Klensin, J., "DNS Privacy, Authorization, Special Uses,
Encoding, Characters, Matching, and Root Structure: Time
for Another Look?", RFC 8324, DOI 10.17487/RFC8324,
February 2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8324>.
[RFC8355] Filsfils, C., Ed., Previdi, S., Ed., Decraene, B., and R.
Shakir, "Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in
Networking (SPRING) Networks", RFC 8355,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8355, March 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8355>.
[RFC8361] Hao, W., Li, Y., Durrani, M., Gupta, S., and A. Qu,
"Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL):
Centralized Replication for Active-Active Broadcast,
Unknown Unicast, and Multicast (BUM) Traffic", RFC 8361,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8361, April 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8361>.
[RFC8362] Lindem, A., Roy, A., Goethals, D., Reddy Vallem, V., and
F. Baker, "OSPFv3 Link State Advertisement (LSA)
Extensibility", RFC 8362, DOI 10.17487/RFC8362, April
2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8362>.
[RFC8377] Eastlake 3rd, D., Zhang, M., and A. Banerjee, "Transparent
Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL): Multi-Topology",
RFC 8377, DOI 10.17487/RFC8377, July 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8377>.
[RFC8378] Moreno, V. and D. Farinacci, "Signal-Free Locator/ID
Separation Protocol (LISP) Multicast", RFC 8378,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8378, May 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8378>.
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[RFC8410] Josefsson, S. and J. Schaad, "Algorithm Identifiers for
Ed25519, Ed448, X25519, and X448 for Use in the Internet
X.509 Public Key Infrastructure", RFC 8410,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8410, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8410>.
[RFC8411] Schaad, J. and R. Andrews, "IANA Registration for the
Cryptographic Algorithm Object Identifier Range",
RFC 8411, DOI 10.17487/RFC8411, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8411>.
[RFC8429] Kaduk, B. and M. Short, "Deprecate Triple-DES (3DES) and
RC4 in Kerberos", BCP 218, RFC 8429, DOI 10.17487/RFC8429,
October 2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8429>.
[RFC8441] McManus, P., "Bootstrapping WebSockets with HTTP/2",
RFC 8441, DOI 10.17487/RFC8441, September 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8441>.
[RFC8446] Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446>.
[RFC8453] Ceccarelli, D., Ed. and Y. Lee, Ed., "Framework for
Abstraction and Control of TE Networks (ACTN)", RFC 8453,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8453, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8453>.
[RFC8455] Bhuvaneswaran, V., Basil, A., Tassinari, M., Manral, V.,
and S. Banks, "Terminology for Benchmarking Software-
Defined Networking (SDN) Controller Performance",
RFC 8455, DOI 10.17487/RFC8455, October 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8455>.
[RFC8456] Bhuvaneswaran, V., Basil, A., Tassinari, M., Manral, V.,
and S. Banks, "Benchmarking Methodology for Software-
Defined Networking (SDN) Controller Performance",
RFC 8456, DOI 10.17487/RFC8456, October 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8456>.
[RFC8466] Wen, B., Fioccola, G., Ed., Xie, C., and L. Jalil, "A YANG
Data Model for Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN)
Service Delivery", RFC 8466, DOI 10.17487/RFC8466, October
2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8466>.
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[RFC8468] Morton, A., Fabini, J., Elkins, N., Ackermann, M., and V.
Hegde, "IPv4, IPv6, and IPv4-IPv6 Coexistence: Updates for
the IP Performance Metrics (IPPM) Framework", RFC 8468,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8468, November 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8468>.
[RFC8471] Popov, A., Ed., Nystroem, M., Balfanz, D., and J. Hodges,
"The Token Binding Protocol Version 1.0", RFC 8471,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8471, October 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8471>.
[RFC8472] Popov, A., Ed., Nystroem, M., and D. Balfanz, "Transport
Layer Security (TLS) Extension for Token Binding Protocol
Negotiation", RFC 8472, DOI 10.17487/RFC8472, October
2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8472>.
[RFC8479] Mavrogiannopoulos, N., "Storing Validation Parameters in
PKCS#8", RFC 8479, DOI 10.17487/RFC8479, September 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8479>.
[RFC8483] Song, L., Ed., Liu, D., Vixie, P., Kato, A., and S. Kerr,
"Yeti DNS Testbed", RFC 8483, DOI 10.17487/RFC8483,
October 2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8483>.
[RFC8492] Harkins, D., Ed., "Secure Password Ciphersuites for
Transport Layer Security (TLS)", RFC 8492,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8492, February 2019,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8492>.
[RFC8493] Kunze, J., Littman, J., Madden, E., Scancella, J., and C.
Adams, "The BagIt File Packaging Format (V1.0)", RFC 8493,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8493, October 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8493>.
[RFC8498] Mohali, M., "A P-Served-User Header Field Parameter for an
Originating Call Diversion (CDIV) Session Case in the
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 8498,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8498, February 2019,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8498>.
[RFCYEAR] RFC Editor, "Number of RFC Published per YEAR", 2020,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcs-per-year/>.
[SSCH] Allen Institute for AI, "Semantic Scholar", 2020,
<https://www.semanticscholar.org/>.
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[TLS13IMP]
TLS WG, "TLS 1.3 Implementations", 2020,
<https://github.com/tlswg/tlswg-wiki/blob/master/
IMPLEMENTATIONS.md>.
[TRKR] IETF, "IETF Data Tracker", 2020,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/>.
Author's Address
Christian Huitema
Private Octopus Inc.
427 Golfcourse Rd
Friday Harbor WA 98250
U.S.A
Email: huitema@huitema.net
Huitema Expires April 28, 2021 [Page 50]
