[quicwg/base-drafts] Retaining the largest received packet number (#3541)

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

In #3537, @ianswett notes that #3315 added this "MUST":

> When discarding unacknowledged ACK Ranges, a receiver MUST retain the largest received packet number.

My understanding is that this prevents the largest acknowledged packet from going backwards.  We use the monotonic increase of the Largest Acknowledged field in two ways:

* In ECN validation, this is used to filter out ACK frames that might have arrived out of order, which might have lower counts legitimately.

* In key updates, where the value of the largest acknowledged is used to drive the change to new keys and to prevent use of old keys after an update.

In my view, having ECN validation fail is quite unfortunate, but likely workable.  On the other hand, uncertainty about largest acknowledged could introduce instability in the key update process.  If an endpoint's conception of what the value is changes, I doubt that we'll see extra key updates (I think that the AEAD would protect us from that), but we might leave open the possibility of interleaving of packets from two different key phases.

I would suggest that we retain this "MUST".

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/3541