Subject: qlog schema

From: Martin Duke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2020 09:33:40 -0800

Hi Robin,

Congrats on your defense! I hope to watch it soon.

We had a chat about qlog at the IESG. The consensus there appears to be
that we should plan to move forward in quicwg with both drafts rather than
seek another venue. However, it would be valuable for you to request a
HotRFC slot to encourage the parallel development of qlog-based standards
in other working groups.

If that's agreeable to you, feel free to proceed.

Martin

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2020 13:14:34 -0500

This is a good step. As one of the authors of the W3C log format, I think
it would have been much better to have a discussion of the log features as
part of the protocol design. There was no interest and which is why there
isn't even a proper spec. Basically, this is like SNMP and MIBs, you want
the MIBs to be developed by the groups developing the protocols.

I would however urge that this be presented as an effort to create a schema
doe log file entries with bindings to JSON and NDJSON rather than a log
file format itself.

It is about time that we had a cryptographic log file format that supports
modern features such as incremental encryption and authentication. The
power of one way sequences has been established by BlockChain. That is not
a framing mechanism I would want to use for a log file but it shows the
principle.

Separating out the protocol specific schema from the framing allows
independent development of each. And yes, I do happen to have an
implementation of a log file format with cryptographic enhancements. And it
can do things like allow rapid location of a specific record range within
the log file, etc.

Why would you want to encrypt your logs? Well, it is a question of HIPPA
and GDPR for some. But more generally, what a service can't read, a service
can't breach. If Mallet gets into my cloud, she is going to find it a lot
harder to sabotage my systems undetected if she can't read the log files
and they are in any case protected using Merkle trees. At that point, all
she can really do is to delete large chunks of log but that will leave
traces.

Given what happened this week, given the serious breaches that will be
announced next month, demand for encrypted logs is going to come quickly
when it comes.

The other reason to encrypt your logs is it provides you with the basis for
an encrypted persistence store with ACID properties.

But that is all in the future. For the time being, the best plan is to
develop one example of a decent log file using the JSON data model. If
there is interest in doing a cryptographic format, that would obviously be
a separate WG. That would focus on the format itself using HTTP/QUIC as the
paradigm from which the general case is developed.

---

From: Robin MARX <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2020 17:18:07 +0100

Hello Martin and others,

Good to hear there is a clear opinion on how to move forward with qlog
within the IETF, thank you for the effort.
I'm also happy it can remain in the QUIC wg for the time being.
I will as proposed register a HotRFC session for IETF 110 to hopefully get
some outside involvement.

@Philip:
I agree we shouldn't define a file format but rather a binding to
JSON/NDJSON/other (binary) formats. This is what I've tried to do so far
with the qlog main schema.
I'm not entirely sure myself we should consider encryption/authentication
of the logs as part of this endeavour, but of course that's something that
can be discussed in a wider group once qlog is adopted.

The plan for now is to continue development of qlog in the existing github
repo at https://github.com/quiclog/internet-drafts until the documents are
adopted.
I suspect we'd cut a new draft-03 right before that.
I would encourage interested people not to wait until then, but to already
engage with the work there in the meantime.

With best regards,
Robin

On Wed, 16 Dec 2020 at 19:14, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> I would however urge that this be presented as an effort to create a
> schema doe log file entries with bindings to JSON and NDJSON rather than a
> log file format itself.
>
> The other reason to encrypt your logs is it provides you with the basis
> for an encrypted persistence store with ACID properties.
>
>

-- 

Robin Marx
PhD researcher - web performance
Expertise centre for Digital Media

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