3.3.2. Sequence Number Generation

The sender's counter is initialized to 0 when an SA is established. The sender increments the sequence number (or ESN) counter for this SA and inserts the low-order 32 bits of the value into the Sequence Number field. Thus, the first packet sent using a given SA will contain a sequence number of 1.

If anti-replay is enabled (the default), the sender checks to ensure that the counter has not cycled before inserting the new value in the Sequence Number field. In other words, the sender MUST NOT send a packet on an SA if doing so would cause the sequence number to cycle. An attempt to transmit a packet that would result in sequence number overflow is an auditable event. The audit log entry for this event SHOULD include the SPI value, current date/time, Source Address, Destination Address, and (in IPv6) the cleartext Flow ID.

The sender assumes anti-replay is enabled as a default, unless otherwise notified by the receiver (see Section 3.4.3) or if the SA was configured using manual key management. Thus, typical behavior of an AH implementation calls for the sender to establish a new SA when the Sequence Number (or ESN) cycles, or in anticipation of this value cycling.

If anti-replay is disabled (as noted above), the sender does not need to monitor or reset the counter, e.g., in the case of manual key management (see Section 5). However, the sender still increments the counter and when it reaches the maximum value, the counter rolls over back to zero. (This behavior is recommended for multi-sender, multicast SAs, unless anti-replay mechanisms outside the scope of this standard are negotiated between the sender and receiver.)

If ESN (see Appendix B) is selected, only the low-order 32 bits of the sequence number are transmitted in the Sequence Number field, although both sender and receiver maintain full 64-bit ESN counters. However, the high-order 32 bits are included in the ICV calculation.

Note: If a receiver chooses not to enable anti-replay for an SA, then the receiver SHOULD NOT negotiate ESN in an SA management protocol. Use of ESN creates a need for the receiver to manage the anti-replay window (in order to determine the correct value for the high-order bits of the ESN, which are employed in the ICV computation), which is generally contrary to the notion of disabling anti-replay for an SA.