| Internet-Draft | Web4 Federation Policy | September 2026 |
| Jacobs | Expires 16 March 2027 | [Page] |
This document defines machine-readable advertisements for federation policies, including authority, versions, profiles, evidence formats, retention, challenges, appeals, revocation, disclosure, jurisdiction, proof, and status.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 16 March 2027.¶
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
This document defines machine-readable Federation Policy Advertisements while keeping governance engines, rankings, private graphs, and internal deliberations out of scope.¶
An advertisement MUST identify the policy, version, accountable authority, effective time, supported profiles, recognized formats, status mechanism, and integrity proof.¶
{
"policy_id": "urn:web4:policy:federation:example:v1",
"issuer_id": "did:example:federation-authority",
"effective_from": "2026-09-12T13:59:00Z",
"supported_profiles": ["urn:web4:profile:assessment:v1"],
"retention_policy": "urn:example:retention:class-2",
"challenge_uri": "https://policy.example/challenge",
"status_uri": "https://status.example/policies/example-v1",
"proof": {
"type": "ExampleProof",
"verification_method": "did:example:federation-authority#key-1",
"value": "BASE64URL-SIGNATURE"
}
}¶
A policy MUST state admission-criteria categories, assurance profiles, evidence retention, challenge and appeal procedures, suspension and revocation, disclosure and minimization, applicable jurisdiction, and supported versions when applicable.¶
A federation MUST provide a stable discovery mechanism that distinguishes active, superseded, withdrawn, and unavailable policies.¶
Material semantic changes MUST produce a new version. Enough history MUST be retained to identify the policy governing past decisions.¶
Conformance does not require publication of eligibility scores, admission rankings, private risk vectors, internal graph relationships, optimization, deliberations, routing, or control-plane data.¶
A conforming federation publishes truthful, versioned, integrity-protected declarations. Publication alone does not prove operator behavior.¶
Broader Web4 architectural work is described informatively in [I-D.reilly-web4]. Informative research materials MAY be published as versioned scholarly artifacts, including DOI-addressable records.¶
A research artifact is not required for conformance unless expressly incorporated as a Normative Reference by a named profile. Referencing or verifying an artifact does not establish the truth of its conclusions, regulatory approval, certification, security, legal compliance, or IETF endorsement.¶
A Conforming Implementation MUST NOT require access to KCoordinate, KQAS, or another protected internal assessment method unless a separate deployment agreement selects that implementation.¶
Implementations MUST authenticate issuers, validate proof integrity, check proof purpose, enforce temporal validity, and resolve current status before relying on an object.¶
Implementations MUST address identifier confusion, issuer impersonation, key compromise, algorithm downgrade, replay, stale status, unauthorized supersession, cross-policy confusion, canonicalization ambiguity, denial of service, and fail-open handling of indeterminate validity.¶
Evidence commitments can confirm correspondence with committed bytes but do not prove truth, completeness, legality, provenance, or fitness for purpose. Profiles SHOULD define privacy-preserving commitment procedures for low-entropy artifacts.¶
Verifiers MUST bind decisions to the exact policy identifier and version named by the relevant object.¶
Persistent identifiers, status queries, proofs, policy references, and linked receipts can enable correlation. Implementations MUST minimize disclosed data and SHOULD use unlinkable or pairwise identifiers where they satisfy policy.¶
Private evidence MAY remain undisclosed and be represented by a cryptographic commitment. Retention and erasure requirements MUST be specified by policy and account for applicable obligations.¶
This document requests no IANA actions.¶