Subject: [MLS] Incentive for refreshing federation and interop in MLS

From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2022 10:35:18 -0400

Hi all,

Some might have seen the news that the EU has adopted the Digital 
Markets Act, which has several interoperability requirements for large 
internet intermediaries.[0] The hardest to fulfill of these would seem 
to me to be e2ee and so that is what I am tracking. There are certainly 
other considerations for the wider IETF community.

Reading the federation draft from Raphael et al [1] seems that the 
hardest part, which is discovery, is out of scope for the draft and it 
would be important to start work on that really sticky piece with a 
complimentary document. My re-read doesn't bring up any issues for the 
MLS protocol itself, but would be interested to learn from a keener 
analysis that says otherwise.

I realise that typically we aren't concerned with policy-driven 
solutions, but there may be WG members who are going to be solving this 
problem regardless and I hope that those efforts can leverage this group 
so that we benefit as a community for the least awful solution to a 
laudable but precarious architectural challenge.

-Mallory

[0] 
https://twitter.com/SamuelStolton/status/1507109844184178689?s=20&t=8TBz_xhbGoXhm0rpb2OYqw

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-mls-federation

-- 
Mallory Knodel
CTO, Center for Democracy and Technology
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