RATS Epoch Markers — draft-ietf-rats-epoch-markers#
IETF 122 (Bangkok) digest Program Wildcard pick Bangkok · 15–21 March 2025
- Tier: Wildcard
- Why: A small, elegant primitive for a problem that's usually solved badly: proving "freshness" without trusting every device's local clock. Not something you'll deploy directly, but a pattern worth recognizing when it shows up elsewhere.
- What: Defines Epoch Markers — "time ticks" produced and distributed by a dedicated system (the Epoch Bell) — so that receiving a specific marker establishes a shared notion of a new epoch across all recipients, without each system needing to track freshness via its own real-time clock. (from abstract only)
- How: Instead of timestamping and trusting clock sync, participants agree on freshness by reference to the same externally-distributed marker (CBOR time tags, RFC 3161 tokens, or nonce-like structures), embeddable as a CWT claim.
- Where applicable: General distributed-systems freshness problem, framed here for attestation replay-resistance but not architecturally specific to RATS — the kind of primitive that tends to get reinvented per-protocol until someone standardizes it once.