Original text:
compatibility purposes.  It MUST be ignored for all purposes.  See TLS13; Appendix D.1 for the rationale for this.  The unified header (unified_hdr) is a structure of variable length, as shown in cid_hdr.

Reviewer comments:
Yet another attempt to This builds on Chris's PR but just omits the epoch entirely from the AEAD nonce calculation. This is more consistent with TLS and doesn't require special case reasoning about why we only need to build in the bottom 16 bits. This relies entirely on the keys being different. Needs analysis.
This seems promising.
NAME this LGTM, but there's a conflict. Can you resolve prior to merging? NAME are you OK with the new rationale, and text that allows it to be relaxed in the future?
If I have understood and calculated correctly DTLS 1.3 limits the number of packets in a AES-GCM connection to 2^40.5 compared to 2^64 in DTLS 1.2. This is quite a severe limitation that is not mentioned explicitly. The AEAD limits in themselves are not a problem, but the combination of AEAD limits (2^24.5) and a small epoch (2^16) is a problem. I think this is major problem in some use cases of DTLS. E.g. most 3GPP 5G use cases where DTLS or DTLS/SCTP is used for semi-permanent connections (lasting years) and where the terminating the connection cause severe disturbances. I did not find any discussion about this problem (but I could easily have missed it) It is known that the limit of 2^48 packets in SRTP can be reached and 2^40.5 is significantly smaller than this... If the document was not in such a late stage, I would have suggested to increase the size of the epoch to 32 bits..... I think this and the other problems DTLS 1.3 has with semi-permanent connections has to be solved sooner than later.
NAME thanks for filing this. I hear you about the late stage, but IIRC we never represent the entire epoch on the wire in any case, so it seems like just changing it to 32 bits would be pretty easy, so why not do it now?
How do the chacha20 numbers compare to the AES-GCM ones?
NAME I don't think (D)TLS 1.3 puts any limits on ChaCha20 so my understanding is understanding is that the total number of packets can be protected in the current drafts is ChaCha20 2^64 (2^48 2^16) AES-GCM 2^40.5 (2^24.5 2^16) AES-GCM 2^39 (2^23 * 2^16)
NAME I am all for changing this now. I made a PR that change epoch from uint16 to uint32. As you say, it seems like a pretty easy change to do. Is uint32 the right size?
Unless you think we should do uint64. NAME NAME what would we have to do to make this change?
URL Magnus Westerlund thinks uint64 would be a safer bet.Michael Tüxen suggest to wrap the uint16 epoch instead. That might be an easier solution. I don't see a direct problem in DTLSPlaintext, ACK message, or recordsequencenumber with a uint16 epoch that is allowed to wrap like: 4, 5, ... 2^16-1, 4, 5, ... 2^16-1, 4, 5, ...
NAME NAME NAME since it's through the IESG we would need to at least raise that this change was made after they had approved it. I suspect that doing some kind of 2-week heads up to the WG/IESG that we want to make the change before landing it. But, if we do that or something more drastic that's really up to NAME
I want to point out that allowing wrapping per may not be the best solution if one considers to use the DTLS epoch as part of the input to the TLS exporter as suggested in . Then one want an input that doesn't wrap, and then to ensure that one doesn't practically run into any limits, then an uint64 would be better. An unit32 appears to be sufficient for a quite extreme use case with minimal messages size (which is one DTLS record with 4 byte user message) and high bandwidth (10 Gbps) sustained over a period of more than 5 years before the epoch would wrap. However, to my understanding the full epoch value are so rarely included in transmitted DTLS messages that its size have minimal implication on the overhead that it is not worth saving 4-bytes to be certain to have eliminated any practical limitation.
I think a 2-week WGLC and notifying the IESG will suffice.
FYI. We have now run into quite many problems with the interworking of semi-permanent DTLS/SCTP connections (lasting years) and DTLS 1.3: No Diffie-Hellman rekeying No post-handshake server authentication No rekeying of the exporter_secret 2^40.5 packets limit 2 minute MSL requirement 2^38.5 byte SCTP user message size limit Our initial plan was to just replace DTLS 1.2 with DTLS 1.3, leave DTLS/SCTP as is, but as the problems keep adding up we are now startnig to consider quite big changes to DTLS/SCTP 1.3 to make this work: URL Using new DTLS connections instead of KeyUpdate could potentially address the first five, but is a significant change.
Hi, Based on the problems long-lived DTLS/SCTP had with DTLS 1.3 (as well as DTLS 1.2 without renegotiation and respecting AEAD limits) we restructured DTLS/SCTP (RFC6083bis) to use parallel connections instead of relying on renegotiation and post-handshake messages. We think this quite easily solves all the problems we had without requiring any updates of DTLS 1.3. It also makes DTLS/SCTP less dependant on version specific DTLS mechanisms. It will hopefully work without changes with any future DTLS 1.4. URL We can now firmly RECOMMEND DTLS 1.3 which I think is very important. 5G is to a large degree replacing or complementing IPsec with TLS, DTLS, and DTLS/SCTP. I will do my best to transition 3GPP to DTLS 1.3 asap. FYI, 3GPP DTLS/SCTP associations have very long lifetimes (can be years), strive for five nines (99.999%) availability and cannot be teared down without causing major disruptions. With such long lifetimes we think mutual reauthentication, rekeying of the SCTP-AUTH key, and forcing attackers to dynamic key exfiltration [RFC7624] are required features. I still think should be done. 2^40.5 packets is quite limiting.
Seems OK.Thanks -- this LGTM. We'll need to do a brief consensus call given the type of change.

Revised text:
compatibility purposes.  It MUST be ignored for all purposes.  See TLS13; Appendix D.1 for the rationale for this. <ins> The least significant 2 bytes of the connection epoch value. </ins> The unified header (unified_hdr) is a structure of variable length, as shown in cid_hdr.