Without specification,
software is incomplete.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
— Fred Brooks

Legacy Drafts

Our specification work started out as Internet-Drafts according to the IETF workflow. We still follow many of their conventions, in order to ease eventual standardization there.

The more urgent aim is to publish reference sources, however. Documents in this section will eventually be updated into PIEs, or obsoleted.

Standard PIEsDraft PIEsLegacy Drafts
Interpeer -- a Human-Centric Networking Architecture
This document describes a novel, human centric networking architecture designed to better meet issues arising on the current Internet. The architecture is derived from an examination of existing architectures and their disadvantages in meeting the above issues.
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Capabilities for Distributed Authorization
Authorization is often the last remaining centralized function in a distributed system. Advances in compute capabilities of miniaturized CPUs make alternative cryptographic approaches feasible that did not find such use when first envisioned. This document describes the elements of such cryptographically backed distributed authorization schemes as a reference for implementations.
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Vessel Container Format
This document describes a generic container file format suitable for authoring content collaboratively, both in real-time or with eventual merging. It is suitable for encapsulating an authoritative view of the resource, or managing multiple diverging versions. Confidentiality and authentication of content are both supported.
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CAProck Compact Wire Encoding
[CAPROCK] is a distributed authorization scheme based on cryptographic capabilities ([I-D.draft-jfinkhaeuser-caps-for-distributed-auth]). This document describes a compact wire encoding for CAProck capabilities, suitable for 0-RTT transmission.
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