Authenticated Transfer(atp)

• IETF124: Wed 05 Nov 2025 09:30 - Place du Canada
• BoF request
• Potentially of interest because: Social media portability and interoperability.
• Keywords: Social media.

The authenticated transfer protocol is at the base of the Bluesky social network. It uses self certifying datastructures to share information accross the network. Central to the idea is that authenticity and authority of the data is rooted in persistent user controlled idintifyer instead to network locations (A typical example of the latter is authentication based on the WEBPKI that is DNS based).

The technology allows user owned data to be portable across the network and provider independent.

The BOF request is pretty clear:

This BoF is to discuss developing a narrowly-defined subset of protocol components within the IETF: the public repository data structure, wire serialization format, and public synchronization mechanism.

This follows a successful side-meeting at IETF 123 in Madrid, and many conversations with individuals over the years. The goal of this non-working-group-forming BoF is to open the topic to the entire IETF community for feedback, share experiences from early experimentation and implementation, and address as many chartering and scope questions as possible. This BoF would be followed on by a formal WG-forming BoF, possibly in an interim meeting.