IETF 126 Highlights

The IETF 126 proceedings provide full materials and recordings, and the "Suggested IETF 126 Sessions for Getting Familiar with New Topics" post is a good companion for background on many of the sessions below. With so much happening during an IETF Meeting, it is not possible to follow everything that happens during the week; this draft is built from the IETF 126 agenda, BoF and session descriptions published ahead of the meeting, and materials posted to the Datatracker. Please also see the photo gallery from IETF 126.

IETF Plenary

Wednesday, 22 July 2026
The plenary is the single meeting session addressed to the whole IETF community, and IETF 126's followed the usual structure: a welcome and greeting from meeting host Cisco, followed by reports from the IETF Chair and IESG, the IAB, the IRTF, the Nominating Committee, the IETF Trust/IPMC, and the IETF Administration LLC. This year's Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) winners were recognized in front of the full community, as is customary, ahead of their talks later in the week at the IRTF Open session. The evening closed with open microphone sessions for the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the IETF Administration LLC Board of Directors (IETF LLC), where any participant can raise questions directly with leadership.

IRTF Open Meeting (irtfopen)

Thursday, 23 July 2026
The IRTF Open Meeting is the Internet Research Task Force's chance to update the broader IETF community on its research groups and cross-cutting work. The centerpiece of this year's session was a pair of Applied Networking Research Prize talks: Rumaisa Habib presented her SIGCOMM 2025 paper (with Kimberly Ruth, Gautam Akiwate, and Zakir Durumeric) formalizing how much of the web's infrastructure quietly depends on a small set of shared services, and Diwen Xue presented his CCS 2025 paper (with Armin Huremagic, Wayne Wang, Ram Sundara Raman, and Roya Ensafi) on fingerprinting the deep packet inspection devices used for network censorship.

IAB Open Meeting (iabopen)

Tuesday, 21 July 2026
The IAB Open Meeting is the Internet Architecture Board's standing venue for updating the community on its technical programs, workshops, and work-in-progress architectural guidance documents, and for taking questions and input directly from participants.

ANRW (ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop)

Monday, 20 July 2026
ANRW is a day-long, jointly organized event of the ACM, the IRTF, and the Internet Society that provides a forum for researchers, vendors, network operators, and the standards community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research. Unlike most IETF sessions, ANRW has its own peer-reviewed paper track, giving it a more academic, conference-style format than a typical working group session. ANRW is a useful on-ramp for researchers who want a foothold in the IETF/IRTF community without committing to a full week of working group sessions.

DISPATCH

Monday, 20 July 2026
DISPATCH is a joint session of the Applications and Real-Time (ART) and Security (SEC) Area dispatch processes, run in the DISPATCH style described in RFC 7957. Its purpose is to triage proposals for new work in the ART and SEC Areas — deciding whether a given problem is appropriate for the IETF and, if so, helping identify or create the right venue for it, whether that's an existing working group, a new BoF, or further list discussion. It functions as a funnel rather than a working group in its own right: proposals that get traction here often reappear later as BoFs or adopted drafts in an existing WG.

Area-Wide Open Meetings

Several IETF Areas hold a standing open meeting at each IETF for Area Director updates, cross-working-group coordination, and general area business. At IETF 126, these included:

Internet Area Working Group (intarea)

Wednesday, 22 July 2026
INTAREA acts as a forum for topics that affect the whole Internet Area — address space issues, basic IP-layer functionality, and architectural questions — and as a channel for distributing information about ongoing Area activities and building shared understanding of Area-wide challenges and goals.

Web and Internet Transport Area Open Meeting (witarea)

Wednesday, 22 July 2026
WITAREA gives an overview of WIT Area activities, with presentations covering deployments and shared operational experience across the Area's working groups.

Operations & Management Area Open Meeting (opsarea)

Thursday, 23 July 2026
OPSAREA serves the same coordination function for the Ops & Management Area, covering updates across its working groups and space for cross-cutting operational topics that don't fit neatly into a single WG.

Security Area Open Meeting (saag)

Friday, 24 July 2026
SAAG is an open forum for discussing security and privacy issues across the Security Area; unlike the others listed here it isn't a working group and doesn't adopt or publish documents itself, but it's a long-standing entry point for raising cross-area security topics.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions

Five BoFs were held at IETF 126. Birds of a Feather sessions are initial discussions about a particular topic of interest to the IETF community. Three of the five concerned AI agent communication and coordination.

Protocol for Transposed Transactions over HTTP (ptth)

Monday, 20 July 2026
Following a first, non-WG-forming BoF at IETF 123, PTTH returned with a proposed charter for a PTTH working group to define a standardized, secure way to swap HTTP client and server roles, useful when a server should only be reachable by a small, known set of clients rather than being publicly addressable. Today this is handled by multiple proprietary, vendor-specific workarounds; PTTH aims to replace them with one interoperable specification. The session tested whether the community had reached rough consensus to adopt the proposed charter, subject to normal Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) review.

Discovery of Agents, Workloads, and Named entities (dawn)

Tuesday, 21 July 2026
DAWN was a working-group-forming BoF seeking consensus to charter a group that would develop requirements and protocol solutions for automated, decentralized, and interoperable discovery — including but not limited to AI agent-to-agent discovery — at the scale needed by distributed processing environments whose components have no pre-configured way to find one another. Discussion continues on the DAWN mailing list.

Continuous Updating and Ratcheting for Rekeying Encrypted Network Transport (current)

Tuesday, 21 July 2026
CURRENT was a working-group-forming BoF aiming to build consensus for a two-party security protocol that uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS) for key management, taking advantage of MLS's asynchronous key updates, forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and support for both traditional and post-quantum cryptography. 

Dynamic Multi-agent Secured Collaboration (dmsc)

Wednesday, 22 July 2026
DMSC was explicitly a non-working-group-forming, diagnostic BoF exploring interoperable protocols and mechanisms for AI Agent Gateway-mediated collaboration — capability exposure, request forwarding, coordination, policy control, and secure communication between agents. Its goal was to profile existing and evolving mechanisms defined elsewhere, identify gaps, and weigh the potential benefits of a formal AI agent gateway model, feeding into (rather than competing with) the agentproto discussion two days later.

Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto)

Thursday, 23 July 2026
Building on a well-attended IETF 124 side meeting and framework/use-case/requirements work, agentproto brought the crowded landscape of competing agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP, ANP, and more) into the IETF, this BoF aimed to identify which building blocks genuinely need standardizing and to test consensus for chartering a Working Group to do it. Discussion continues on the AGENTPROTO mailing list.

Other sessions

IETF Hackathon

Saturday and Sunday, 18-19 July 2026
The IETF Hackathon was a two-day event where participants develop and test that their code can interoperate with others, or where new code is written, often to implement recent IETF work. Nearly 800 onsite and remote participants registered for the IETF Hackathon to collaborate on nearly 70 projects.

Technology Deep Dive: CBOR and CDDL

Wednesday, 22 July 2026

Technology Deep Dives are informational sessions (not tied to a single working group) meant to give an approachable update on an active area of IETF work for people who aren't already deep in it. This one covered CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) and CDDL (Concise Data Definition Language), the compact binary data format and schema language widely used in IoT and other constrained-network contexts. As a Deep Dive rather than a working group meeting, the session's purpose is educational rather than decision-making — no documents are adopted or consensus calls made — making it one of the more accessible sessions for participants who want to understand why CBOR/CDDL matter without first working through the relevant WG's document queue.

All photos by Lisa Leutner