Name Quick UDP-based Internet Connection (QUIC)
Acronym QUIC
Area TSV
Personnel
Chairs TBD
Area Director: Spencer Dawkins
Security Area Advisor: TBD
There is emerging implementation and deployment experience with QUIC, a UDP-based protocol that provides a stream-multiplexing encrypted transport. Based on that implementation and deployment experience, the QUIC working group will provide a standards track specification generalizing the design described in the initial set of draft-tsvwg-quic-protocol, draft-tsvwg-quic-loss-recovery, and related documents. Key goals for QUIC are: minimizing connection establishment and overall transport latency for applications, starting with HTTP/2; providing multiplexing without head-of-line blocking; enabling deployment over unmodified Internet paths; and enabling multipath and forward error correction extensions.
The work of the group will have four main focus areas, corresponding to four core deliverables. The first of these is the core transport work, which will describe the wire format, along with the mechanisms for connection establishment, stream multiplexing, data reliability, loss detection and recovery, congestion control, and negotiation. QUIC is expected to support rapid iterability and experimentation, and this work will also describe a versioning process that enables distributed experimentation with QUIC.
The second of these focus areas is security. This work will describe how the protocol uses the facilities of TLS 1.3 for key negotiation and will also describe how those keys are used to provide confidentiality and integrity protection. It will also provide a threat model description specific to connection resumption, along with a description for denial-of-service mitigations.
The third focus area will describe mappings between specific applications’ semantics and the transport facilities of QUIC. The first mapping will be a description of HTTP/2 semantics using QUIC, specifically with the goal of minimizing web latency using QUIC. Upon completion of that mapping, additional protocols may be added by updating this charter to include them.
The fourth focus area will extend core protocol facilities to enable multipath and forward error correction (FEC). These extensions will be separate from the core protocol and will be described in separate documents. Importantly, the FEC extension will describe QUIC protocol mechanisms required to enable negotiation and use of FEC schemes; specific FEC scheme definitions are out of scope.
Note that consensus is required both for changes to the current protocol mechanisms and retention of current mechanisms. In particular, because something is in the initial document set does not imply that there is consensus around the feature or around how it is specified.
Milestones
Working group adoption of Core Protocol document Working group adoption of Loss detection and Congestion Control document
Working group adoption of TLS 1.3 mapping document
Working group adoption of HTTP/2 mapping document
Working group adoption of Multipath extension document
Working group adoption of FEC extension document
Core Protocol document to IESG
Loss detection and Congestion Control document to IESG
TLS 1.3 Mapping document to IESG
HTTP/2 mapping document to IESG
Multipath extension document to IESG
FEC extension document to IESG