The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels
Abstract
In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. Authors who follow these guidelines should incorporate this phrase near the beginning of their document:
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR)
(2003) · doi:10.17487/rfc3626 · Cited by 4,880
Allman, M., Paxson, V., & Blanton, E. (2009) · doi:10.17487/rfc5681 · Cited by 2,523
The NewReno Modification to TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm
Henderson, T., Floyd, S., Gurtov, A., & Nishida, Y. (2012) · doi:10.17487/rfc6582 · Cited by 1,410
A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)
(2006) · doi:10.17487/rfc4271 · Cited by 965
PPP Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
Blunk, L., & Vollbrecht, J. (1998) · doi:10.17487/rfc2284 · Cited by 855
Metadata
- Authors
- Bradner, S.
- Publisher
- RFC Editor
- Published
- 1997-03
- OpenAlex
- W1744779065
- Cited by
- 2,997
- References
- 0
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.17487/rfc2119
- The paper
- Bradner, S. (1997). Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. https://doi.org/10.17487/rfc2119
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
