End-to-end encryption presents a vital tool for users to protect their communications against third parties. To ensure a good user experience it is important to agree on shared standards which are widely rolled out and adopted by implementations.
There already exists a number of encryption protocols with different properties and scopes. It is necessary to coordinate the efforts of further improving those standards to identify and unify common problems and patterns.
The role of the SIG shall be as follows:
The SIG-E2EE shall not itself approve XMPP extension protocols (XEPs), which tasks shall remain under the purview of the XMPP Council.
The scope of the SIG is limited to end-to-end encryption in contexts which are useful for instant messaging.
The SIG-E2EE shall be open to the public and shall not be limited to elected members of the XMPP Standards Foundation. Anyone who works with, or is interested in encryption protocols is invited to take part.
Discussions shall be conducted in a dedicated openly accessible mailing list.
The SIG-E2EE shall be a standing SIG, and shall exist as long as the XMPP Council deems it useful.
The SIG-E2EE should maintain active existing end-to-end encryption specifications and keep them up to date.
It should also coordinate the production of future end-to-end encryption specifications to keep up with the state of the art.
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The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is defined in the XMPP Core (RFC 6120) and XMPP IM (RFC 6121) specifications contributed by the XMPP Standards Foundation to the Internet Standards Process, which is managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force in accordance with RFC 2026. Any protocol defined in this document has been developed outside the Internet Standards Process and is to be understood as an extension to XMPP rather than as an evolution, development, or modification of XMPP itself.
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Errata can be sent to <editor@xmpp.org>.
The following requirements keywords as used in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119: "MUST", "SHALL", "REQUIRED"; "MUST NOT", "SHALL NOT"; "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED"; "SHOULD NOT", "NOT RECOMMENDED"; "MAY", "OPTIONAL".
Note: Older versions of this specification might be available at http://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/
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