QUIC - Quick UDP Internet Connections

INTRO

QUIC is designed to accelerate web application delivery and make it more secure.

It is a general-purpose , reliable transport protocol for web and other applications - over UDP.

All major browsers support QUIC protocol and all major industries have already started and implemented from TCP to QUIC.

Only thing is both client and server should have proper configurations to support QUIC protocol , else it won’t work.

WHY REPLACE TCP

• The below is the development of web over TCP.

• The major reasons to change TCP to QUIC is shown below.

• For instance the network roundtrip of TCP comprises of three components. A 3 way TCP hand shake , then TLS handshake and finally the client GET request will take place. So if you see the below screenshot the time taken for the client request is more when using TCP protocol. This is where QUIC protocol provides an enhanced performance.

• The QUIC protocol in the first packet , it already can embed the TLS handshake into the connection setup and get data moving in one network round trip as shown below. And even better than that if this client has already communicated with this server or service in the very recent past , the client can even send the GET request along with the initial packet of handshake to the server, resulting in what’s called 0-RTT ( ZERO-RTT ) performance. So from packet number 1, we are already moving data.

• Also one final note to replace TCP is the fact that the full header is unencrypted , even if the encompassed data is not. So using just the headers, there’s plenty that we can learn about the application, how it moves , how well it responds, and we can even hijack the connection because so much can be passively observed. Now QUIC will address this problem because security is part of its design from the ground up.

HISTORY OF QUIC

• Back in 2012 GOOGLE first began to develop its own proprietary protocol for speeding up connectivity to its services.
• And this protocol was called GQUIC or Google QUIC.