Google's QUIC

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Fri Jun 28 20:09:43 UTC 2013


http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/google-making-the-web-faster-with-protocol-that-reduces-round-trips/?comments=1

Sorry if this is a little more on the dev side, and less on the ops side but since
it's Google, it will almost certainly affect the ops side eventually.

My first reaction to this was why not SCTP, but apparently they think that middle
boxen/firewalls make it problematic. That may be, but UDP based port filtering is
probably not far behind on the flaky front.

The second justification was TLS layering inefficiencies. That definitely has my
sympathies as TLS (especially cert exchange) is bloated and the way that it was
grafted onto TCP wasn't exactly the most elegant. Interestingly enough, their
main justification wasn't a security concern so much as "helpful" middle boxen
getting their filthy mitts on the traffic and screwing it up.

The last thing that occurs to me reading their FAQ is that they are seemingly trying
to send data with 0 round trips. That is, SYN, data, data, data... That really makes me
wonder about security/dos considerations. As in, it sounds too good to be true. But
maybe that's just the security cruft? But what about SYN cookies/dos? Hmmm.

Other comments or clue?

Mike




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