7. Security Considerations

7. Security Considerations

This document makes no semantic changes to [RFC8569], nor to any of the security properties of the message encodings described in [RFC8609]; hence, it has the same security considerations as those two documents. Careful consideration is needed for networks that deploy forwarders with support (updated forwarder) and without support (legacy forwarder) for this compact time representation:

Interest Lifetime: A legacy forwarder interprets a time code as an Interest Lifetime between 0 and 255 milliseconds. This may lead to a degradation of network performance, since Pending Interest Table (PIT) entries timeout quicker than expected. An updated forwarder interprets short lifetimes set by a legacy forwarder as time codes, thus configuring timeouts of up to 4 years. This leads to an inefficient occupation of state space.

Recommended Cache Time: A legacy forwarder considers a Recommended Cache Time with length 1 as a structural or syntactical error and it SHOULD discard the packet (Section 10.3.9 of [RFC8569]). Otherwise, a legacy forwarder interprets time codes as absolute time values far in the past, which impacts cache utilization.