10. Identity Association

10. Identity Association

An "identity-association" (IA) is a construct through which a server and a client can identify, group, and manage a set of related IPv6 addresses. Each IA consists of an IAID and associated configuration information.

A client must associate at least one distinct IA with each of its network interfaces for which it is to request the assignment of IPv6 addresses from a DHCP server. The client uses the IAs assigned to an interface to obtain configuration information from a server for that interface. Each IA must be associated with exactly one interface.

The IAID uniquely identifies the IA and must be chosen to be unique among the IAIDs on the client. The IAID is chosen by the client. For any given use of an IA by the client, the IAID for that IA MUST be consistent across restarts of the DHCP client. The client may maintain consistency either by storing the IAID in non-volatile

storage or by using an algorithm that will consistently produce the same IAID as long as the configuration of the client has not changed. There may be no way for a client to maintain consistency of the IAIDs if it does not have non-volatile storage and the client's hardware configuration changes.

The configuration information in an IA consists of one or more IPv6 addresses along with the times T1 and T2 for the IA. See section 22.4 for the representation of an IA in a DHCP message.

Each address in an IA has a preferred lifetime and a valid lifetime, as defined in RFC 2462 [17]. The lifetimes are transmitted from the DHCP server to the client in the IA option. The lifetimes apply to the use of IPv6 addresses, as described in section 5.5.4 of RFC 2462.