Sorry for bringing this up so late in the process, but I recently had
reasons to read the JWT draft and saw the following definition:
IntDate
A JSON numeric value representing the number of seconds from 1970-
01-01T0:0:0Z UTC until the specified UTC date/time. See RFC 3339
[RFC3339] for details regarding date/times in general and UTC in
particular.
This definition is ambiguous with respect to the treatment of leap
seconds. It would probably be best to specify that this is a notional
count of seconds from 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z, similar to the POSIX
definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch", which assumes that every
calendar day contains exactly 86400 seconds. I believe RFC 3339 gives
no guidance in this area. It would also useful to specify whether it's
expected to be an integer; I might guess yes, because the authors could
intend "Int" to be an abbreviation for "Integer".
I have seen evidence that some system administrators see operational
problems with some protocols when they configure their systems to keep a
non-conforming variant of POSIX time that includes leap seconds.
(Interestingly enough, these involve a set of tzdata zone names that
have a prefix of "right/".)
If programs running on such systems transmit their non-conforming time_t
values by encoding them directly in IntDate fields, recipients may see
illusory time offsets representing the accumulated number of leap
seconds (about 25 currently), even though the sending and receiving
systems will likely agree on encoded RFC 3339 UTC time stamps except in
the immediate vicinity of a leap second. It may seem like a small
offset now, but I believe that it is expected to grow significantly
larger in the future, unless leap seconds are abolished.
Minor issue: the hour, minute, and second fields for the Epoch should be
two digits in RFC 3339 format.
Recommended new text:
IntDate
A JSON numeric value representing the notional number of integer
seconds from 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z UTC until the specified UTC
date/time, ignoring leap seconds. This is equivalent to the POSIX
[POSIX ref here] definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch", where
each calendar day contains exactly 86400 seconds. See RFC 3339
[RFC3339] for details regarding date/times in general and UTC in
particular.
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