The Authenticated Received Chain, or ARC, was published by the IETF RFC Editor on Tuesday, July 9th, 2019 as RFC 8617. The general information page for RFC 8617 can be found here, but there are direct links to HTML, PDF, and text versions available. ARC has been published under the IETF’s Experimental status, which is explained in this section of RFC 2026. This reflects that fact that some fine-tuning is expected after Internet senders and receivers gain experience with the protocol after deploying it widely, and seeing what the operational impacts are.
DMARC.org first publicly announced the ARC protocol in October 2015, and it became an official work item of the IETF DMARC Working Group in June 2016. The specification went to “working group last call” in October 2018, but attention shifted to several related areas that needed clarification. This led to revisions to the header field for authentication status (RFC 8601), and updating SPF (RFC 7208), DKIM (RFC 6376), and DMARC (RFC 7489) to better handle internationalized domain names (RFC 8616).