Every secure connection you make depends on standards written in an open process that anyone can join. That openness is also what makes the process hard to protect.
The IETF has to handle abuse and bad-faith participants without censoring the protocols themselves. It now also faces a growing workload from AI-generated and LLM-assisted submissions.
The person explaining that tension has just finished two terms as one of the IETF's top security leaders.
In his SecTor 2026 talk, "The Past and Future of the Internet Standards Process ('Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the IETF')", on Wednesday, October 7 at 3:25 p.m. in Room 701B, Paul Wouters explains how the IETF actually works.
Speaker: Paul Wouters, Cloud Security and Cryptography Engineer, Aiven
The talk covers the history of the standards process and what is changing inside it today. Its central question is whether the IETF can remain an open, uncensored "network of networks."
Paul Wouters leads cloud security and cryptography work at Aiven. He previously spent about a decade in Red Hat's crypto and VPN technologies group.
He recently completed his second term as IETF Security Area Director, overseeing 13 working groups. He has co-authored 15 RFCs covering IPsec, IKEv2, DNS, DNSSEC and TLS.
He is the release manager for the libreswan VPN project and an active Fedora developer. He also co-founded HackLab.to, a makerspace in Toronto.
His IETF datatracker profile lists his RFCs. They include RFC 9395, which he edited to formally deprecate IKEv1.
Protocol engineers, cryptographers and anyone curious about how the internet's rules get made will find a rare inside view here.
Should the IETF screen out AI-generated drafts, or would that undermine the openness that makes it work?
Source: r/pwnhub · by /u/_cybersecurity_