Standard Considerations
The Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) is really complicated. That complication is in support of a range of multi-party computation (MPC) capabilities. However, in practice it is used for far simpler tasks, like adding numbers. This post provides an aggressively simplified summary of how DAP works in the modes that people use. So, in the spirit of “the hardest problem in computer science is…
Today, the IETF held the CURRENT BoF, where the goal was to develop a new protocol. That protocol would be substantially like TLS, reusing its record layer and basic structure, but it would drop in MLS for key exchange. This is somewhere between a pretty bad idea and a horrible idea. The wholesale replacement of a huge chunk of protocol architectures is a hallmark of a lot of the AI-generated…
About this page This page shows a bunch of annoying dialogs to anyone who has JavaScript enabled. The checks can be bypassed by hitting the Escape key five times. There are a few other ways to get through the checks, which I’ll leave undocumented. An inverse CAPTCHA It’s been the case for a few years now that bots are better able to solve CAPTCHA than humans. That being the case, we are…
I see this often. Someone comes out with new protocol. Almost invariably, the first examples look like this: { "version": "1.0", "some": ["protocol", "stuff", "..."] } I’m sorry to say that my first reaction is 🤦. It’s that version field. Version fields like that are close to useless for versioning. This post explains why. What can you do with a version field? What you concretely do with a…
Before I start, go and read https://www.hacklore.org/letter . When it comes to endpoint security, unless you are operating in the “Mossad” threat model [1] , this is solid advice. The letter is absolutely right that the advice we used to give people about operational security practices has not aged well. However, completely rejecting some of the defunct advice might come with privacy costs. The…
AI preferences exist to give those who create and distribute content online a way to express how they would like to see that content used. This post is a detailed technical update on the present state of the work, focusing on the recent developments. I make an attempt to explore some of the issues that arise from those recent discussions. Background This is for those who weren’t following along,…
So you have a device, maybe IoT, or just something that sits in a home somewhere. You want to be able to talk to it with HTTPS. Recall Zooko’s “meaningful, unique, decentralized” naming trichotomy . HTTPS chooses to drop “decentralized”, relying on DNS as central control. In effect, HTTPS follows a pretty narrow definition. To offer a server that works, you need to offer a TLS endpoint that has a…
A lot of people are deeply concerned about misinformation. People often come to believe in falsehoods as part of how they identify with a social group. Once established, false beliefs are hard to overcome . Beliefs are a shorthand we use in trying to make sense of the world . Misinformation is often propagated in order to engender delusion, or a firmly-held belief that does not correspond with…
Why does this matter? A lot of governments are engaging with projects to build “Digital Public Infrastructure”. That term covers a range of projects, but one of the common and integral pieces relates to government-backed identity services. While some places have had some form of digital identity system for years — hi Estonia! — there are many more governments looking to roll out some sort of…
Before I start on my thoughts, if you work for a W3C member organization, please head to the 2023 TAG Election page . Voting is open until 2023-12-14. If you are considering how you might like to rank me when voting, read on. I can’t promise that this post will provide much additional context, but it might. The W3C TAG is a bit of a strange institution. The TAG occupies a position of some…
Fraud and abuse online are pretty serious problems. How sites manage fraud is something of a mystery to most people. Indeed, as this post will show, that’s deliberate. This post provides an outline of how fraud management operates. It looks at the basic techniques that are used and the challenges involved. In doing so, it explores the tension between fraud management and privacy. Hopefully this…
Aggregation is a powerful tool when it comes to providing privacy for users. But analysis that relies on aggregate statistics for privacy loss hides some of the worst effects of designs. Background A lot of my time recently has been spent looking at various proposals for improving online advertising. A lot of this work is centred on the Private Advertising Technology Community Group in the W3C…
The idea of bundling is deceptively simple. Take a bunch of stuff and glom them into a single package. So why is it so difficult to teach the web how to bundle? First a note: this is my personal opinion and an incomplete one at that. Though I work for Mozilla, this post is part of my process of grappling with a complex problem. Mozilla has made a statement regarding Google’s bundled exchanges,…
There is a perennial question in standards development about the value of the different artefacts that the process kicks out. One subject that remains current is the relative value of specifications against things like compliance testing frameworks. Reasonable people tend to place different weight on tests, with a wide range of attitudes. In the past, more people were willing to reject attempts to…
I spend a shocking amount of my time staring at IETF documents, both Internet-Drafts and RFCs. I have spend quite a bit of time looking at GitHub README files and W3C specifications. For reading prose, the format I routinely find to be the most accessible is the text versions. This is definitely not based on the quality of the writing, all of these formats produce unreadable documents. What I…
The IAB EDM Program [1] met this morning. While the overall goal of the meeting, we ended up talking a lot a document I wrote a while back and how to design version negotiation in protocols. This post provides a bit of background and shares some of what we learned today after what was quite a productive discussion. Protocol Ossification The subject of protocol ossification has been something of a…
Today we heard an announcement that Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly are collaborating on a new technology for improving privacy of DNS queries using a technology they call Oblivious DoH (ODoH). This is an exciting development. This posting examines the technology in more detail and looks at some of the challenges this will need to overcome before it can be deployed more widely. How ODoH Provides…