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Session Date/Time: 14 Mar 2026 03:07

HACKATHON

Summary

The kickoff session for the IETF Hackathon was led by Benno Overeinder. The session outlined the objectives of the weekend, which include implementing IETF drafts, performing interoperability testing, and fostering collaboration between the open-source community and the IETF. Key logistical information regarding scheduling, presentation requirements, and the Monday Hack Demo Happy Hour was provided.

Key Discussion Points

• Objectives and Philosophy: Benno Overeinder emphasized the IETF mantra of "rough consensus and running code." The hackathon aims to make standards more relevant through implementation, attracting new developers, and providing a space for collaborative experimentation.
• IPR and Rules of Engagement: The IETF Note Well applies to all discussions and presentations. However, code produced during the hackathon is not considered an IETF contribution, whereas the discussions around it and the results presented are.
• Logistics and Tools:
  • Participants were encouraged to use the Hackathon wiki to find projects or use the "lost and found" section to match skills with teams.
  • Gathertown is available for remote participants to collaborate with on-site teams.
  • The IETF Hackathon GitHub repository is available for teams to host their code and access presentation templates.
• Presentation Guidelines:
  • Sunday presentations are limited to 3 minutes.
  • Content should focus on the problem solved, achievements over the weekend, lessons learned, and specific feedback for the relevant Working Groups.
  • Slides must be uploaded to the Data Tracker in PDF format by 14:00 on Sunday.
• GitHub Documentation Project: A speaker highlighted a project at Table 20 (led by Greg and Dhruv Dhody) focused on improving IETF documentation. They are seeking input on how to better use GitHub for authoring and reviewing IETF documents.
• Hack Demo Happy Hour: Teams are encouraged to present their results to the broader IETF community on Monday from 18:00 to 19:00 in the foyer.

Decisions and Action Items

• Action Item: Teams wishing to participate in the Hack Demo Happy Hour must register their team by 13:00 on Monday.
• Action Item: Presenters must upload their final slides to the Data Tracker Sunday afternoon slot before the 14:00 start time.

Next Steps

• Hackathon Working Sessions: Saturday and Sunday morning/afternoon.
• Results Presentations: Sunday, 14:00 – 16:00.
• Hack Demo Happy Hour: Monday, 18:00 – 19:00.

Presentations

• IETF Hackathon Kickoff Slides - Benno Overeinder

Session Date/Time: 15 Mar 2026 06:00

HACKATHON

Summary

The IETF 121 Hackathon concluded with a series of project presentations demonstrating "running code" across a wide range of IETF technologies. Key themes for this session included AI agent communication and security, RPKI and BGP security enhancements, Remote Attestation (RATS), and advancements in YANG modeling and network telemetry. Participants focused on interoperability, validating draft specifications, and developing reference implementations.

Key Discussion Points

AI Agent Security and Communication

• Transaction Token Profiles for A2A: Peter presented on using draft-ietf-oauth-transaction-tokens to securely propagate user identity and authorization context in Agent-to-Agent (A2A) calls. The project mapped critical A2A message information into immutable data fields to prevent prompt injection and intent manipulation.
• OAuth 2.0 Scope Aggregation: A project presented by Shuping Peng focused on multi-step AI agent workflows. It proposed a solution where agents initiate a single OAuth flow for aggregated scopes to reduce user consent prompts.
• Agent Naming and Discovery: Dushenguang and Sui demonstrated using DNS (SVCB and TXT records) as a naming and discovery mechanism for agents across domains, focusing on stable identifiers.
• AI Agent Gateways: Several teams (Wei Wang, Hu Tianshuo, and others) presented gateway architectures for cross-domain agent collaboration, protocol translation (e.g., MCP to A2A), and task orchestration.
• Task Discovery: A shift from "Agent Cards" to "Task Cards" was proposed to allow agents to discover tasks posted by owners, potentially leading to a new "Tasking" work area.
• Optimizing Agent Context: Zeze Zhang and Shuping Peng demonstrated that using structured context instead of plaintext for agent interactions reduced token consumption by up to 70%.

Remote Attestation (RATS) and Security

• Co-Serv: Thomas Fossati, Shefali, Paul, and Hank implemented a minimalist query language for pulling endorsements in RATS. They confirmed that Co-Serv and CoRIM (Concise Reference Integrity Manifest) are highly compatible and successfully integrated HTTP caching (RFC 9111).
• Attested TLS and Relay Attacks: Viacheslav and Jan-Peter used ProVerif to analyze intra-handshake attestation. They concluded it is vulnerable to relay attacks and not suitable for standardization, instead advocating for post-handshake attestation as described in draft-vusa-tace-expect.
• PQC Interoperability: Corey Bonnell reported on adding Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) support to X.509 structures, focusing on ML-KEM and composite signatures.
• RATS PKIX Evidence: Mike demonstrated that an LLM (Claude) could successfully generate a reference implementation for draft-ietf-rats-pkix-evidence, suggesting LLM code generation as a metric for specification clarity.

Routing and RPKI

• RPKI Enhancements: Nan Gong presented two projects: selective syncing of RPKI data to routers to reduce overhead and RPKI-based validation using prioritized resource data (IRR and AI-inferred data).
• BGP Flowspec: Yu Jia presented extensions to BGP Flowspec for packet content matching, aligned with the IDR working group's Flowspec V2 work.
• BGP Security: Ziwei Li presented "Minimal Exposure AS Path Verification," a mechanism to verify AS paths without exposing sensitive interconnection policies.
• CCPipe: A team implemented a Concurrent and Conflict-Free Pipeline for RPKI Relying Parties to reduce validation latency by up to 73%.
• Source Address Validation (SAV): Cao Qian demonstrated making SAV information visible using new IPFIX information elements to export drop reasons and evidence.

Operations and Management (YANG/Network Management)

• Applying YANG Provenance: A team enhanced the implementation of draft-ietf-opsawg-yang-provenance using CBOR and COSE to provide data integrity for YANG-modeled datasets.
• YANG Push Integration: Thomas Graf and collaborators integrated YANG Push into message brokers like Apache Kafka. They tested interoperability with consumers like Ciena Blue Planet and Cisco Crosswork, focusing on operational metrics (IETF and IEEE YANG models).
• AnSAn (Autonomous Network and Service Abstractions): Guo Zhen presented a methodology for automatically generating RESTful APIs from YANG data models.
• Distributed Authorization: Lucía Cabanillas demonstrated a model for distributed authorization policy sharing using YANG to carry "policies-as-code" (Rego/OPA) logic.

Protocols and Transport

• SRv6 for Interlayer Programming: Minxue Wang demonstrated SRv6 End.IL behavior for interworking between underlay links (MTN/FG-MTN) and SRv6 services.
• XMPP Time Zones: Daniel improved XMPP client support for querying and displaying contact time zones based on an extension from 2006.
• HPWAN: Chuansong and team tested RDMA performance and QUIC-based optimizations for high-performance wide area networks.

Decisions and Action Items

• Consensus on Attested TLS: The project team concluded that intra-handshake attestation is insecure and will move forward with post-handshake attestation proposals.
• Hack Demo Happy Hour: Participants were invited to register their projects on the wiki for the demonstration session.

Next Steps

• AI Agent Security Side Meeting: Scheduled for Thursday 11:00-12:00 (Hunan room) to discuss identity, authentication, and authorization for agents.
• AnSAn BOF: Scheduled for Tuesday morning to discuss autonomous network abstractions.
• NMOP Working Group: Discussion on YANG Push and message broker integration to continue Friday morning.
• Confidential AI Research Group: A side meeting was proposed to explore the formation of a new research group.
• Standardization: Several projects (BGP Flowspec, RATS, SRv6) announced plans to bring hackathon results back to their respective working groups (IDR, RATS, SPRING) during the IETF 121 week.

Related Documents

draft-ietf-oauth-transaction-tokens, draft-ietf-opsawg-yang-provenance, draft-ietf-rats-pkix-evidence, draft-vusa-tace-expect