Week ending October 16, 2026 — Sector Watch

The IESG sent the IETF STIR working group’s proposed charter to external review on October 16, with an approval decision scheduled for the November 5 telechat. The new scope is entity identification. The charter states the gap: STIR authenticates a call and the authorization to use a number, but a verifier has no standard way to tell which entity a delegate certificate represents. The recharter lets the group take on standards-track work binding a PASSporT to an identifier for the entity that holds the number, with a required document on the privacy implications of exposing that association.

Standards in motion

IETF

STIR’s recharter is out for community review, and it opens the working group to entity identification. The proposed charter keeps the group maintaining PASSporT and the baseline call-authentication protocols. Its new work item is standards-track documents that associate a PASSporT with an identifier for the entity holding the right to use an assigned number, plus documentation of the privacy implications under RFC 6973. Individual drafts already address that problem, among them VESPER and TN-to-domain binding, which binds a domain identifier to telephone number authority in STIR certificates. Under the current charter the group has no work item to adopt them into.

The charter also carries forward work the group already has in progress: certificate transparency for STIR credentials, a working-group draft, and out-of-band discovery of STIR credentials and services, including connected identity where SIP signaling is not end-to-end. Messaging is named as a context the group will consider.

Out of scope: vetting policy, regulatory requirements, governance and authorization frameworks, and governance of numbering authorities, certificate authorities or transparency services. The charter fixes the trust model for the core assertion that a calling number is not spoofed to the existing certificate-based, administratively governed model; alternative trust anchors or non-certificate identifiers for that binding would need another recharter. Separate signers of auxiliary information about a call are allowed, provided that information stays bound to and subordinate to a first-party assertion. Coordination with ATIS and the SIP Forum on SHAKEN deployment is written in.

The work is open: a neutral body, implementable without permission. The entity identifier carries the privacy question: an identifier on a call tells each verifier who is behind the number. The charter does not limit the association to enterprise callers, and the required privacy document is where that gets answered. Adoption read: STIR/SHAKEN is deployed across SIP networks and the new work builds on its certificates. The entity-identifier drafts stay individual submissions until the charter clears.

Enterprise & web identity

The OpenID Foundation’s agent identity group published a threat model for agents that cross provider boundaries. The AI Identity Management Community Group released A Protocol-Agnostic Threat Classification for Cross-Boundary AI Agent Authorization on October 12. Its premise is that no single gateway will control all agent traffic, because each major provider runs its own and none will hand that role to a competitor. It sorts the threats at those boundaries into six areas: knowing which agent is acting, how two domains decide to trust each other’s keys and assertions, an agent acting on the wrong resource after crossing, permissions broadening when translated between domains, access outliving the task it was granted for, and credential capture and replay. It names treating an agent as a human user as the common root. Its recommendations are authorization-time controls over detection after the fact, and for standards bodies and providers to treat interoperability as a security control.

The group calls the paper a threat model and says it is not a solution; it defines no protocol and names none as the fix. The cross-system flow in the IETF’s AIMS draft, covered October 2, uses OAuth token exchange and identity chaining, which is the translation step where the paper places permission broadening. Adoption read: none; a threat model has no implementations. The group says authentication, authorization and mitigation guidance come next, and it runs the MCP interoperability event at the Gartner IAM Summit in December, and that event’s participant and interop matrix is the adoption artifact to watch.

Implementations & adoption

Germany passed the law that lets its EUDI wallet launch on January 2, and the pseudonym function may not be ready for it. The Bundestag adopted the Digital Identities Act on October 15, supplementing the amended eIDAS Regulation. The German wallet, d-you, starts January 2, 2027, and use is voluntary. Amendments made in the digital affairs committee on October 14 let users refuse to have their biometric photo included in their digital identity data, cut the deadline for providing attribute attestations from 24 to 12 months, and keep the federal citizen account available as an alternative gateway. The law provides for registering relying parties.

A coalition resolution says that if the pseudonym function is not ready at launch, the government must add it as soon as possible, and calls it mandatory for conformity with EU law. The federal data protection commissioner had called the lack of pseudonymous use a problem. Consumer advocates called relying-party registration a formality and asked that data requests be limited to what each case strictly needs; the Bundestag’s account does not say whether the final text does that. The account names no credential format or protocol, and a University of Potsdam expert told the committee that much of the wallet’s security architecture is neither public nor formally assessed.

The privacy protections, pseudonyms and the biometric photo opt-out, are written into statute. A legislated launch date for a national wallet is a mandate driving uptake. Whether d-you ships with pseudonyms on January 2, or ships without them, is the thing to check.