[dmarc-ietf] Proposed Recharter to Conclude the ARC Experiment

[Trent Adams <[e-mail]>]

DMARC Folks -

Now that the DMARC WG has successfully achieved the recent goals (yay!)… perhaps there’s bandwidth to take on the small task of helping to finally close out some prior work that was left aside.

Specifically, I’m hoping that we can officially close the Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) experiment.  As folks remember, we called the DMARC intermediary breakage problem out of scope in order to publish RFC7489… moving the work of addressing the issue into what became the experimental ARC RFC (RFC8617).

Now that the experiment has essentially been running since the initial draft in 2015, through a dozen or so revisions, resulting in the Experimental RFC being issued in 2019… we have over a decade of operational experience with it.  During that time, we’ve collectively learned a lot about what has worked, what hasn’t, and how we can fold our collective experience into an effective, scalable mitigation against intermediary DMARC breakage.

A handful of folks have collaborated on a draft that effectively calls for declaring the ARC experiment complete, with a suggestion for moving further development of what was learned into the DKIM WG where we’re incorporating a similar (and enhanced) signed chaining model.

Concluding the ARC Experiment
(draft-adams-arc-experiment-conclusion-01)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-adams-arc-experiment-conclusion/

While discussing the proposal, we wondered what path would be the most reasonable to follow for moving the work forward… and the rough consensus (so far) was to first bring it to the DMARC WG as this was where the ARC work began.  So… the question for the folks here is… would you be interested in a very tightly-scoped rechartering of the DMARC WG to expressly take on the activity (and only this activity) of considering, amending, and potentially approving the “Concluding the ARC Experiment” draft so that we can officially move forward?

To help prime the pump for consideration of rechartering, we’ve drafted a (very) short draft of a proposed DMARC WG charter for this specific work:

https://github.com/ietf-artarea/charters/blob/main/dmarc/charter.md

Please give both drafts a read and see if you think that this group would be the right place to spin up this work, and please reply with your thoughts.  The current DMARC WG Chairs (Barry Leiba, Seth Blank) as well as the AD (Andy Newton) will be gathering a sense of the room to determine consensus for moving forward.

NOTE: We’re not asking for your opinion about the work itself at this time (good / bad / how to improve it)… but rather, would this group be interested in having those discussions here… once we know where to have the discussion… then the floodgates will open (and I’ll be sure to batten down the hatches).

Thanks for your consideration!

Cheers,
Trent


--

J. Trent Adams

Director, Ecosystem Security

Proofpoint



[e-mail]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtrentadams