SHAKEN's PASSporT spec gets a revision as 8588bis is requested for publication

Ben Campbell has requested publication of draft-ietf-stir-8588bis-01 as a Proposed Standard for the STIR working group — a revision of RFC 8588, the “PASSporT Extension for SHAKEN” that defines how SHAKEN attestation is actually carried. The datatracker entry has the details.

Disclosure: I’m a co-author of 8588bis, with Mary Barnes — so read what follows as an interested party’s note, not a neutral one.

RFC 8588 is core SHAKEN plumbing: it specifies the SHAKEN PASSporT and the A/B/C attestation levels carriers stamp onto calls. A “bis” revision means the working group is updating the document that essentially every U.S. call-signing deployment implements, so even incremental changes ripple out through carrier and analytics implementations.

When the spec that defines attestation levels gets reopened, it’s worth reading the diff. Subtle changes to how full, partial, and gateway attestation are described have a habit of resurfacing later as arguments about analytics, labeling, and call blocking.