| RFC 9916 | Updates for PCEPS | January 2026 |
| Dhody, et al. | Standards Track | [Page] |
Section 3.4 of RFC 8253 specifies TLS connection establishment restrictions for PCEPS; PCEPS refers to usage of TLS to provide a secure transport for the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP). This document adds restrictions to specify what PCEPS implementations do if they support more than one version of the TLS protocol and to restrict the use of TLS 1.3's early data.¶
This is an Internet Standards Track document.¶
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841.¶
Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9916.¶
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
Section 3.4 of [RFC8253] specifies TLS connection establishment restrictions for PCEPS; PCEPS refers to usage of TLS to provide a secure transport for the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP) [RFC5440]. This document adds restrictions to specify what PCEPS implementations do if they support more than one version of the TLS protocol, e.g., TLS 1.2 [RFC5246] and TLS 1.3 [RFC9846], and to restrict the use of TLS 1.3's early data, which is also known as 0-RTT data. All other provisions set forth in [RFC8253] are unchanged, including connection initiation, message framing, connection closure, certificate validation, peer identity, and failure handling.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Step 1 in Section 3.4 of [RFC8253] includes restrictions on PCEPS TLS connection establishment. This document adds the following restrictions:¶
Implementations that support multiple versions of the TLS protocol MUST prefer to negotiate the latest version of the TLS protocol; see Section 4.2.1 of [RFC9846].¶
PCEPS implementations that support TLS 1.3 or later MUST NOT use early data.¶
The security considerations of PCEP [RFC5440] [RFC8231] [RFC8253] [RFC8281] [RFC8283], TLS 1.2 [RFC5246], TLS 1.3 [RFC9846], and TLS/DTLS recommendations [RFC9325] apply here as well.¶
This document has no IANA actions.¶
We would like to thank Adrian Farrel, Stephane Litkowski, Cheng Li, and Andrew Stone for their review.¶