It’s stopping the serial changing too fast. 

-- 
Mark Andrews

> On 2 Dec 2023, at 06:43, Warren Kumari <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Dear DNSOP (and Wes),
> 
> I was wading through my mailbox and realized that I hadn't seen any 
> discussion of this.
> 
> 
> I'm quite sure that 2^16 is not a typo (there is quite a lot of text around 
> this section), but I cannot really figure out / remember what exactly the 
> threat model here is. 
> 
> Here are the relevant paragraphs:
> Sec 2.1.1.1.  The SOA Serial Field:
> "Although Section 3.2 of [RFC1982] describes how to properly implement
>    a less-than comparison operation with SOA serial numbers that may
>    wrap beyond the 32-bit value in both the SOA record and the CSYNC
>    record, it is important that a child using the soaminimum flag must
>    not increment its SOA serial number value more than 2^16 within the
>    period of time that a parent might wait between polling the child for
>    the CSYNC record."
> 
> Sec 5.  Security Considerations
> "To ensure that an older CSYNC record making use of the soaminimum
>    flag cannot be replayed to revert values, the SOA serial number MUST
>    NOT be incremented by more than 2^16 during the lifetime of the
>    signature window of the associated RRSIGs signing the SOA and CSYNC
>    records.  Note that this is independent of whether or not the
>    increment causes the 2^32 bit serial number field to wrap."
> 
> 
> I can (mostly) understand why the SOA must not fully wrap (2^32) or probably 
> even 1/2 wrap (2^31), but what bad thing would happen if it incremented by 
> e.g 2^24? 
> 
> It might just be that 2^16 was sufficiently far from 2^32 that it was viewed 
> as "conservative even with much slop", but that feels somewhat like a cop-out…
> 
> Can someone help me understand?
> W
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 1:45 PM, Bob Harold <[email protected]> wrote:
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7477#section-5
>> section 5.  Security Considerations
>> last paragraph
>> 
>> "the SOA serial number MUST NOT be incremented by more than 2^16"
>> 
>> 2^16 is a very small fraction of the 2^32 serial number space.  It seems 
>> that half of the 2^32 would be sufficient, which is 2^31 (not 2^16).  Is 
>> that a typo, or is there a reason for the small range?
>> 
>> -- 
>> Bob Harold
>> 
>> _______________________________________________ 
>> DNSOP mailing list 
>> [email protected] 
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
>> 
> 
> 
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