Birds of a Feather at IETF 126

The IETF 126 Vienna meeting takes place 18–24 July 2026. As at every IETF meeting, alongside the established Working Groups there will be a handful of Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions—and these are often the most interesting place to watch where Internet standards work is heading next.

A Birds-of-a-Feather session is an initial, community-wide discussion about a topic that may be ripe for new work in the IETF. Some BoFs are working-group-forming: their goal is to confirm that there is enough consensus, energy, and a tight enough scope to charter a new Working Group, often with a draft charter already on the table. Others are non-working-group-forming: they exist to take the temperature of the community, refine a problem statement, and identify gaps before anyone commits to chartering anything.

Five BoFs are scheduled for IETF 126, all of them meeting in Grand Park Hall 3 with online remote participation also available. Details for every BoF session are available through the IETF 126 meeting agenda webpage. Some of the BoFs already have active email list discussions underway (though note that names of the email lists and BoFs may not match).

Protocol for Transposed Transactions over HTTP (ptth)

When: Monday, 20 July 2026, 16:30–18:00 CEST

Following a first BoF at IETF 123, PTTH proponents return with a proposed charter for a new Working Group. The goal is a uniform and secure method for swapping HTTP server and client roles in an interoperable manner. This would be used, for example, when a server is only intended to be accessed directly by a small number of clients, the server knows how to reach these approved clients, and the server is not widely accessible by arbitrary clients due to security or routing constraints. Currently, there are multiple proprietary or vendor-specific deployed solutions for each of these use cases. The PTTH mailing list, set up ahead of IETF 123, has an archive with discussions since that time.