Subject: Re: [Wpack] wpack@ietf110: minutes posted

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2021 09:55:42 -0400

>From the minutes

Daniel Ehrenberg: The motivation for removing some of these features
is to reduce the scope to increase the adoption. There is particular
concern around how content-blockers will work in this context.

Martin Thomson: I think this is the right sort of thing to be thinking
about right now. But a narrowly targeted thing is more likely to be
successful here. If we cut a little too deep, we always have the
opportunity to define something more specific later, possibly with a
different MIME type.

People keep saying this in IETF and I have yet to see evidence for the
claim. Deployment depends on two things, first cost of implementation,
second the utility of the product. Fewer features means lower cost but it
also means lower incentive to deploy.

There are good reasons to keep a tight hand on features, but deployment
isn't one of them. Forcing people to think at a higher level and produce a
more flexible product is the reason I object to niche features that fail to
extend to wider use.

I designed, implemented and specified DARE by myself in under three months.
It does everything WPACK does and more. Besides being a ZIP file format, it
supports incremental authentication via a Merkle Tree, it also supports
incremental encryption and threshold cryptography. Now if I can design and
implement in three months, I really don't think it's the implementation
cost that is stopping adoption.

None of my features are optional because I am going after a different use
case - securing data at rest. WPACK is not a format that could be used to
encrypt and authenticate the transaction log of a database or a social
media forum because those applications simply haven't been considered. But
it could be if that was considered from the start. Instead what will happen
is that a set of choices is made in the first version that foreclose later
choices.

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare-11.html

On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 9:35 PM Sean Turner <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hi! I have posted the minutes from WPACK’s session at IETF110:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/110/materials/minutes-110-wpack-00
>
> Thanks to Chris Lemmons for taking notes. Please send any comments to
> [email-masked].
>
> spt
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