IETF 124 Montreal 2025

Observations from IETF 124

The 124th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) took place in early November in Montreal. These meetings influence how future internet standards evolve, especially in TLS, certificates, cryptography, and secure transport protocols. Many of the topics discussed have a direct impact on the OpenSSL Library roadmap and on the expectations of our support customers.

And we could not miss this opportunity, so our engineer Bob Beck joined in person. Let us take you through a quick summary of the whole week.

A New Working Group for Post-Quantum PKI: PLANTS

One of the most important outcomes of the week was the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on PKI, Logs, and Tree Signatures. This resulted in the establishment of a new working group, PLANTS (short for PKI, Logs, and Tree Signatures).

The group will focus on:

• post-quantum-safe certificate formats
• tree-based structures for scalable certificate issuance
• future transparency mechanisms that may succeed today’s Certificate Transparency logs
• work often described as Merkle Tree Certificates

And we will be involved more going forward.

Hallway Insights

It has become a known thing that when we show up somewhere in our branded merchandise conversations often lead to what we could improve, what should the new release include or let go of already. And this was not an exception. We highly appreciate getting insights from real-life users of the OpenSSL Library or our services in general. What can improve your services more than solutions to the pain points of your customers, right?

On the other hand, we were also asked to provide our point of view on issues of other developers, and we are always happy to help with these, so anytime you see us somewhere, don’t hesitate to reach out with your questions

Thoughts from Hackathon on Performance and Compatibility

The IETF Hackathon brought useful discussions with engineers from several companies and open-source projects. They shared performance issues observed in real deployments and described areas where the OpenSSL Library’s and BoringSSL’s APIs behave differently. There was agreement to document these pain points clearly so they can be evaluated for OpenSSL 4.0 and future work.

Conclusion

IETF 124 showed strong progress in the development of post-quantum PKI, secure transport protocols, and the evolution of certificate ecosystems. The creation of the PLANTS working group is an important milestone. Continued work in TLS, LAMPS, and CFRG also points to clear directions for the next few years.

For the OpenSSL Corporation, these outcomes influence the design of future releases, the planning of support work, and our long-term strategy for post-quantum migration. Our active participation in the IETF helps ensure that the OpenSSL Library continues to reflect the standards and practices that secure the global internet.