Internet DRAFT - draft-kuehlewind-quic-appman

draft-kuehlewind-quic-appman







Network Working Group                                      M. Kuehlewind
Internet-Draft                                               B. Trammell
Intended status: Informational                                ETH Zurich
Expires: July 15, 2017                                  January 11, 2017


      Applicability and Management of the QUIC Transport Protocol
                    draft-kuehlewind-quic-appman-00

Abstract

   This document discusses the applicability and manageability of the
   QUIC transport protocol, focusing on caveats impacting application
   protocol development and deployment over QUIC, and network operations
   involving QUIC traffic.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Notational Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Applicability of QUIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  The Necessity of TCP Fallback . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Zero RTT: Here There Be Dragons . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.3.  Stream versus Flow Multiplexing . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Manageability of QUIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  QUIC Public Header Structure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.2.  Integrity Protection of the Wire Image  . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.3.  Connection ID and Rebinding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.4.  Packet Numbers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.5.  Stateful Treatment of QUIC Traffic  . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.6.  Measuring QUIC Traffic  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     7.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     7.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

1.  Introduction

   QUIC [I-D.ietf-quic-transport] is a new transport protocol currently
   under development in the IETF quic working group, focusing on support
   of semantics as needed for HTTP/2 [I-D.ietf-quic-http] such as
   stream-multiplexing to avoid head-of-line blocking.  Based on current
   deployment practices, QUIC is encapsulated in UDP and encrypted by
   default.  This means the version of QUIC that is currently under
   development will integrate TLS 1.3 [I-D.ietf-quic-tls] to encrypt all
   payload data including all header information needed for for stream-
   multiplexing and most on the other header information.  Given QUIC is
   an end-to-end transport protocol, all information in the protocol
   header is not meant to be mutable by the network, and will therefore
   be integrity- protected to the extent possible.

   This document serves two purposes:

   1.  It provides guidance for application developers that want to use
       the QUIC protocol without implementing it on their own.  This
       includes general guidance for application use of HTTP/2 over QUIC
       as well as the use of other application layer protocols over
       QUIC.  For specific guidance on how to integrate HTTP/2 with
       QUIC, see [I-D.ietf-quic-http].





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   2.  It provides guidance for network operation and management of QUIC
       traffic.  This includes guidance on how to interpret and utilize
       information that is exposed by QUIC to the network as well as
       explaining requirement and assumption that the QUIC protocol
       design takes toward the expected network treatment.

1.1.  Notational Conventions

   The words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", and "MAY" are used in this
   document.  It's not shouting; when they are capitalized, they have
   the special meaning defined in [RFC2119].

2.  Applicability of QUIC

   In the following subsections we discuss specific caveats to QUIC's
   applicability, and issues that application developers must consider
   when using QUIC as a transport for their application.

2.1.  The Necessity of TCP Fallback

   QUIC uses UDP as a substrate for userspace implementation and port
   numbers for NAT and middlebox traversal.  While there is no evidence
   of widespread, systematic disadvantage of UDP traffic compared to TCP
   in the Internet [Edeline16], somewhere between three [Trammell16] and
   five [Swett16] percent of networks simply block UDP traffic.  All
   applications running on top of QUIC must therefore either be prepared
   to accept connectivity failure on such networks, or be engineered to
   fall back to TLS, or TLS-equivalent crypto, over TCP.  These
   applications must operate, perhaps with impaired functionality, in
   the absence of features provided by QUIC not present in TLS over TCP:
   The most obvious difference is that TCP does not stream multiplexing
   and there stream multiplex would need to be implemented in the
   application layer if needed.  Further, TCP by default does not
   support 0-RTT session resumption.  TCP Fast Open can be used but
   might no be supported by the far end or could be blocked on the
   network path.  Note that there is at least evidence of middleboxes
   blocking SYN data even if TFO was successfully negotiated.  Moreover,
   while encryption (in this case TLS) is inseparable integrated with
   QUIC, TLS negotiation over TCP can be blocked.  In case it is
   RECOMMENDED to abort the connection.

   We hope that the deployment of a proposed standard version of the
   QUIC protocol will provide an incentive for these networks to permit
   QUIC traffic.  Indeed, the ability to treat QUIC traffic statefully
   as in Section 3.5 removes one network management incentive to block
   this traffic.





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2.2.  Zero RTT: Here There Be Dragons

   QUIC provides for 0-RTT connection establishment (see section 3.2 of
   [I-D.ietf-quic-transport]).  However, data in the frames contained in
   the first packet of a such a connection must be treated specially by
   the application layer.  Since a retransmission of these frames
   resulting from a lost acknowledgment may cause the data to appear
   twice, either the application- layer protocol has to be designed such
   that all such data is treated as idempotent, or there must be some
   application-layer mechanism for recognizing spuriously retransmitted
   frame and dropping them.

   [EDITOR'S NOTE: discuss defenses against replay attacks using 0-RTT
   data.]

2.3.  Stream versus Flow Multiplexing

   QUIC's stream multiplexing feature allows applications to run
   multiple streams over a single connection, without head-of-line
   blocking between streams, associated at a point in time with a single
   five-tuple.  Streams are meaningful only to the application; since
   stream information is carried inside QUIC's encryption boundary, no
   information about the stream(s) whose frames are carried by a given
   packet is visible to the network.

   Stream multiplexing is not intended to be used for differentiating
   streams in terms of network treatment.  Application traffic requiring
   different network treatment should therefore be carried over
   different five-tuples (i.e.  multiple QUIC connections).  Given
   QUIC's ability to send application data on the first packet of a
   connection (if a previous connection to the same host has been
   successfully established to provide the respective credentials), the
   cost for establishing another connection are extremely low.

   [EDITOR'S NOTE: For discussion: If establishing a new connection does
   not seem to be sufficient, the protocol's rebinding functionality
   (see section 3.7 of [I-D.ietf-quic-transport]) could be extended to
   allow multiple five-tuples to share a connection ID simultaneously,
   instead of sequentially.]

3.  Manageability of QUIC

   This section discusses those aspects of the QUIC transport protocol
   that have an impact on the design and operation of devices that
   forward QUIC packets.  This section is concerned primarily with
   QUIC's unencrypted wire image, which we define as the information
   available in the packet header in each QUIC packet, and the dynamics
   of that information.



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   QUIC is a versioned protocol.  Everything about the header format can
   change except the mechanism by which a receiver can determine whether
   and where a version number is present, and the meaning of the version
   number field itself.

   The rest of this document is concerned with the public header
   structure of the version of the QUIC transport document that is
   current as of this writing.

3.1.  QUIC Public Header Structure

   In the current version of the QUIC protocol, the following
   information are optionally exposed in the QUIC header:

   o  flags: All QUIC packets have one byte of flags at the beginning of
      their header.  The definition of these flags can change with the
      version of QUIC, expect for the version flag that indicated that
      the version number is present in the QUIC header.  Other bits of
      the flag field in the current version of QUIC are the connection
      ID flag, the packet number size field, the public reset flag, and
      the key phase flag.

   o  version number: The version number is present if the version bit
      in the flags field is set.  The version flag is always set in the
      first packet of a connection but could also be set in other
      packets.

   o  connection ID: The connection ID is present if the connection ID
      bit in the flag field is set.  The connection ID flag is always
      set on the first packet of a connection and can be set on others.
      Further the connection ID flag is always set when the public reset
      bit is set as well.  QUIC connections are resistant to IP address
      changes.  Therefore if exposed, the same connection ID can occur
      in QUIC packet with different 5-tuples, indicating that this QUIC
      packet belongs to the same connection.

   o  packet number: The packet number is variable length as indicated
      by packet number size field.  If the length is indicated as zero
      the packet number is not present.  If the public reset flag is
      set, the packet number cannot be present.

   o  diversification nonce [EDITOR'S NOTE: talk about this once it's
      clear what it will be...]








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3.2.  Integrity Protection of the Wire Image

   All information in the QUIC header, even if exposed to the network,
   is integrity protected, therefore a device on the network path MUST
   not change these information.  Altering of header information would
   fail any integrity check, leading to packet drop at the receiver.

3.3.  Connection ID and Rebinding

   A flow might change one of its IP addresses but keep the same
   connection ID, as discussed in Section 3.1.  [EDITOR'S NOTE: What
   does that mean for the network, if anything (given the connection ID
   is only rarely present)?]

3.4.  Packet Numbers

   Packet numbers are monotonically increasing.  Packets containing
   retransmissions as well as packets containing only control
   information, such as acknowledgments, will get a new packet numbers.
   Therefore pure control and retransmission packets are impossible to
   distinguish on the wire.

   While loss detection in QUIC is still based on packet numbers,
   congestion control by default provides richer information than
   vanilla TCP does.  Especially, QUIC does not rely on duplicated ACKs,
   making it more tolerant of packet re-ordering.

3.5.  Stateful Treatment of QUIC Traffic

   Stateful network devices such as firewalls use exposed header
   information to support state setup and tear-down.  In-line with
   [I-D.trammell-plus-statefulness] (which provides a general model for
   in- network state management), the presence of a Connection ID on
   QUIC traffic can be used as an association/confirmation signal;
   QUIC's public reset may be used as a partial one-way stop signal.

   [EDITOR'S NOTE: note public reset changes for state management may be
   desirable: two-way stop as in [I-D.trammell-plus-statefulness] has
   nice properties.]

3.6.  Measuring QUIC Traffic

   Given packet numbers can be expected to be exposed on most packets
   (expect public reset but that terminates the connection anyway),
   packet numbers can be used by the network to measure loss that
   occurred between the sender and the measurement point in the network.
   Similarly, out-of-order packets indicate upstream reordering.  Unlike




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   with TCP, there is no way to measure downstream loss and RTT
   passively.

   [EDITOR'S NOTE: the addition of a simple packet number echo would
   allow passive RTT measurement and partial passive downstream loss/
   reordering measurement.  Packet number echo can be sampled at the
   echo-side (i.e. one-in-N packets or 1/p packets can carry an echo)
   for efficiency tradeoff, if necessary.]

   [EDITOR'S NOTE: in-network devices can inspect and correlate
   connection IDs for partial tracking of mobility events.]

4.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no actions for IANA.

5.  Security Considerations

   Especially security- and privacy-relevant applicability and
   manageability considerations are given in Section 2.2, Section 3.2,
   and Section 3.3.

6.  Acknowledgments

   This work is partially supported by the European Commission under
   Horizon 2020 grant agreement no. 688421 Measurement and Architecture
   for a Middleboxed Internet (MAMI), and by the Swiss State Secretariat
   for Education, Research, and Innovation under contract no. 15.0268.
   This support does not imply endorsement.

7.  References

7.1.  Normative References

   [I-D.ietf-quic-transport]
              Iyengar, J. and M. Thomson, "QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed
              and Secure Transport", draft-ietf-quic-transport-00 (work
              in progress), November 2016.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.








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7.2.  Informative References

   [Edeline16]
              Edeline, K., Kuehlewind, M., Trammell, B., Aben, E., and
              B. Donnet, "Using UDP for Internet Transport Evolution
              (arXiv preprint 1612.07816)", December 2016.

   [I-D.ietf-quic-http]
              Bishop, M., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over
              QUIC", draft-ietf-quic-http-00 (work in progress),
              November 2016.

   [I-D.ietf-quic-tls]
              Thomson, M. and (. (Unknown), "Using Transport Layer
              Security (TLS) to Secure QUIC", draft-ietf-quic-tls-00
              (work in progress), November 2016.

   [I-D.trammell-plus-statefulness]
              Kuehlewind, M., Trammell, B., and J. Hildebrand,
              "Transport-Independent Path Layer State Management",
              draft-trammell-plus-statefulness-02 (work in progress),
              December 2016.

   [Swett16]  Swett, I., "QUIC Deployment Experience at Google (IETF96
              QUIC BoF presentation)", July 2016.

   [Trammell16]
              Trammell, B. and M. Kuehlewind, "Internet Path
              Transparency Measurements using RIPE Atlas (RIPE72 MAT
              presentation)", May 2016.

Authors' Addresses

   Mirja Kuehlewind
   ETH Zurich
   Gloriastrasse 35
   8092 Zurich
   Switzerland

   Email: mirja.kuehlewind@tik.ee.ethz.ch











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   Brian Trammell
   ETH Zurich
   Gloriastrasse 35
   8092 Zurich
   Switzerland

   Email: ietf@trammell.ch












































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