QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new encrypted-by-default Internet transport protocol, that provides a number of improvements designed to accelerate HTTP traffic as well as make it more secure, with the intended goal of eventually replacing TCP and TLS on the web. In this blog post we are going to outline some of the key features of QUIC and how they benefit the web, and also some of the challenges of supporting this radical new protocol.
There are in fact two protocols that share the same name: “Google QUIC” (“gQUIC” for short), is the original protocol that was designed by Google engineers several years ago, which, after years of experimentation, has now been adopted by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for standardization.
“IETF QUIC” (just “QUIC” from now on) has already diverged from gQUIC quite significantly such that it can be considered a separate protocol. From the wire format of the packets, to the handshake and the mapping of HTTP, QUIC has improved the original gQUIC design thanks to open collaboration from many organizations and individuals, with the shared goal of making the Internet faster and more secure.
So, what are the improvements QUIC provides?
Built-in security (and performance)
One of QUIC’s more radical deviations from the now venerable TCP, is the stated design goal of providing a secure-by-default transport protocol. QUIC accomplishes this by providing security features, like authentication and encryption, that are typically handled by a higher layer protocol (like TLS), from the transport protocol itself.
The initial QUIC handshake combines the typical three-way handshake that you get with TCP, with the TLS 1.3 handshake, which provides authentication of the end-points as well as negotiation of cryptographic parameters. For those familiar with the TLS protocol, QUIC replaces the TLS record layer with its own framing format, while keeping the same TLS handshake messages.
Not only does this ensure that the connection is always authenticated and encrypted, but it also makes the initial connection establishment faster as a result: the typical QUIC handshake only takes a single round-trip between client and server to complete, compared to the two round-trips required for the TCP and TLS 1.3 handshakes combined.
