Digital Emblems: When Markings Are Required, but You Have No Rattle-Can

Physical vs Digital Markings under International Law

There are physical markings that are required under hundreds of different international laws, some governing transport of goods across national borders, some offering humanitarian protections on the battlefield, some seeking to protect the environment or genetic diversity… What they all have in common is that they’re currently represented by visual marks applied to objects. Many of these processes are undergoing “digitalization,” and becoming machine-readable, or electronically-signaled. A standards effort currently underway in the IETF seeks to create a common global marking protocol which would allow open-standards-based devices to scan, cryptographically validate, and display the digital versions of these marks. This session will relate the state of the standards effort, the scope of markings that have been considered thus far, and seek input on security or privacy vulnerabilities which may exist in the proposed standard.