Internet Engineering Task Force

One of those efforts is something called Wimsy.

It's an IETF working group on workload identity in multi-system environments.

Interesting because it was addressing a problem that sounded fairly specialized until you realized how much modern infrastructure depends on what it was looking at, which is that software needs identities too.

And now a year later, I mean, Whimsy has actually gotten even more interesting than it already was.

Again, those drafts aren't actually adopted by WMSE.

Some proposals may eventually become WMSE documents.

Some may go to OAuth or another IETF working group.

Some may merge with other proposals, and some may simply disappear.

So talk a little more about the vendor neutrality or the vendor nuance issues that you've run into.

Yeah, I mean, this was a big part of my life at Cisco and to some degree also at VMware that I spent a lot of my life at the IETF for better and worse.

And one sort of anecdote I think that illustrates this was We came up with the idea of MPLS, BGP, VPNs.

And really, when I say we, it was mostly Eric Rosen and Jakob Rector were, I think, the brains behind that.

We just sort of published it because that was a thing you could do back in the 90s.

And then we started talking it up to some potential customers.

And pretty early on, the question would come up and say, when is this going to the IETF properly? Like, when are you going to actually standardize it? Because we have zero interest in deploying this if it only runs on Cisco gear.

And so the mandate from the big customers that these clever techniques had to interoperate came early and often.

So where we are as of October 2026? Things which are shipped, agent identities in major directories, the latest MCP specification with tight authorization rules and cross app access with several identity vendors adopted within days of each other.

Things which are still in draft are OAuth 2.1 itself and an IETF proposal on agent authentication co-written by engineers from Okta, Ping, AWS, Zscaler, OpenAI and DeFacto.

NIST is still working on it too.

And the biggest gap which is still there is a standard for one agent safely handing work to another which is still open.

I think it's desperately needed.

And I want nothing more than to help Dick and Carl and everybody else get these IETF standards shift.

But as they always say, you got to make it easy, right? You got to make it easy for people to use these things for them to work.

And I think we're getting there.

There really was a, and still is in the ICANN space, a group of engineers who built it, designed it, but also cared very deeply about how the technology was used.

And you have standards bodies like the IETF out there that are still doing what's important in terms of creating the right standards.

But that community played such an important role in how governance of the domain name system grew.

And they were a presence in ICANN throughout those years and often consulted, you know, that's the The first thing I did when I got to Network Solutions is I called actually one of the engineers I work with today, Leslie Daigle, who's the CTO at Global Cyber Alarmist.