Analysis of QUIC session establishment and its implementations

Eva Gagliardi (1) , Olivier Levillain (2, 3, 4, 5)

1 Ministère des armées
2 IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
3 R3S-SAMOVAR - Réseaux, Systèmes, Services, Sécurité
4 TSP - RST - Département Réseaux et Services de Télécommunications
5 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

In the recent years, the major web companies have been working to improve the user experience and to secure the communications between their users and the services they provide. QUIC is such an initiative, and it is currently being designed by the IETF. In a nutshell, QUIC originally intended to merge features from TCP/SCTP, TLS 1.3 and HTTP/2 into one big protocol. The current specification proposes a more modular definition, where each feature (transport, cryptography, application, packet reemission) are defined in separate internet drafts. We studied the QUIC internet drafts related to the transport and cryptographic layers, from version 18 to version 23, and focused on the connection establishment with existing implementations. We propose a first implementation of QUIC connection establishment using Scapy, which allowed us to forge a critical opinion of the current specification, with a special focus on the induced difficulties in the implementation. With our simple stack, we also tested the behaviour of the existing implementations with regards to security-related constraints (explicit or implicit) from the internet drafts. This gives us an interesting view of the state of QUIC implementations.

Mots clés: Secure communications; QUIC; Protocol implementation

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Eva Gagliardi, Olivier Levillain. Analysis of QUIC session establishment and its implementations. 13th IFIP International Conference on Information Security Theory and Practice (WISTP), Dec 2019, Paris, France. pp.169-184, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-41702-4_11⟩. ⟨hal-02468596⟩