2.5. Sequence Number

This unsigned 32-bit field contains a counter value that increases by one for each packet sent, i.e., a per-SA packet sequence number. For a unicast SA or a single-sender multicast SA, the sender MUST increment this field for every transmitted packet. Sharing an SA among multiple senders is permitted, though generally not recommended. AH provides no means of synchronizing packet counters among multiple senders or meaningfully managing a receiver packet counter and window in the context of multiple senders. Thus, for a multi-sender SA, the anti-reply features of AH are not available (see Sections 3.3.2 and 3.4.3).

The field is mandatory and MUST always be present even if the receiver does not elect to enable the anti-replay service for a specific SA. Processing of the Sequence Number field is at the discretion of the receiver, but all AH implementations MUST be capable of performing the processing described in Section 3.3.2, "Sequence Number Generation", and Section 3.4.3, "Sequence Number Verification". Thus, the sender MUST always transmit this field, but the receiver need not act upon it.

The sender's counter and the receiver's counter are initialized to 0 when an SA is established. (The first packet sent using a given SA will have a sequence number of 1; see Section 3.3.2 for more details on how the sequence number is generated.) If anti-replay is enabled (the default), the transmitted sequence number must never be allowed to cycle. Thus, the sender's counter and the receiver's counter MUST be reset (by establishing a new SA and thus a new key) prior to the transmission of the 2^32nd packet on an SA.