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The Next Version of HTTP Won't Be Using TCP (zdnet.com) 258

"The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP protocol, officials at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have revealed," writes Catalin Cimpanu via ZDNet. "This will become the second Google-developed experimental technology to become an official HTTP protocol upgrade after Google's SPDY technology became the base of HTTP/2." From the report: HTTP-over-QUIC is a rewrite of the HTTP protocol that uses Google's QUIC instead of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as its base technology. QUIC stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections" and is, itself, Google's attempt at rewriting the TCP protocol as an improved technology that combines HTTP/2, TCP, UDP, and TLS (for encryption), among many other things. Google wants QUIC to slowly replace both TCP and UDP as the new protocol of choice for moving binary data across the Internet, and for good reasons, as test have proven that QUIC is both faster and more secure because of its encrypted-by-default implementation (current HTTP-over-QUIC protocol draft uses the newly released TLS 1.3 protocol).

In a mailing list discussion last month, Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP and QUIC Working Group, made the official request to rename HTTP-over-QUIC as HTTP/3, and pass it's development from the QUIC Working Group to the HTTP Working Group. In the subsequent discussions that followed and stretched over several days, Nottingham's proposal was accepted by fellow IETF members, who gave their official seal of approval that HTTP-over-QUIC become HTTP/3, the next major iteration of the HTTP protocol, the technology that underpins today's World Wide Web.

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The Next Version of HTTP Won't Be Using TCP

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  • NOOOOOO! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zidium ( 2550286 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @07:49PM (#57634272) Homepage

    The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!

    • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:02PM (#57634356)

      If you don't serve your pages over QUIC your search rankings will go into the shitter, just like they did with AMP. You do like people being able to find your content, don't you? It'd be a shame if that didn't happen anymore.

    • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:11PM (#57634402)

      The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!

      It is a public open standard. Nobody "owns" it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Waccoon ( 1186667 )

        As with any other technology, it's owned by the people who make the largest contributions and have the largest amount of political influence over the standards bodies that approve the standard.

        These days, "open public standard" is as meaningful as "open source". The politics are always a problem, and we all know how well Google is faring in that department.

      • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:09AM (#57635582)

        The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!

        It is a public open standard. Nobody "owns" it.

        No RFCs are like opinions, however instead of having a proper open debate about this, large companies like Google, Cloudflare or Mozilla will just stuff it down our throats. The process simply isn't democratic.

        Considering that we probably have gotten most of the problematic TCP/TLS/HTTP bugs out, having a completely new stack will mean several new decades of new security problems. Secret services are probably rejoicing right now as more complexity will mean more bugs which will make the attack surface much bigger again.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The same argument could be made about any new protocol that is selected for HTTP/3.

          And we do need something new. The current tech is widely abused to improve performance by subverting the TCP bandwidth estimation that slowly ramps up, making sites load slowly.

          QUIC makes a real difference, especially on mobile connections. Since it's based on UDP and other existing standards most of the security stuff has been resolved already. And it's optional, HTTP/2 and TCP are not going to go away for a very long time.

          • Web sites don't load badly because of some problems of TCP, but because
            a) existing features of HTTP/HTML are not used (like request pipeliuning)
            b) Web design has evolved into utter crap with layers upon layers of needless waste.

    • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @10:27PM (#57635016) Journal

      They are already the IE 6 of this decade. Notice on Android phones when you switch apps from YOUTUBE you see the video playing in the background?

      Well that is HTML 5.... err Google HTML 5 called Picture in Picture canvas. It is a proprietary Google CSS that web developers judge other browsers by. This is just one example well Google decides which standards are used and it makes Firefox and Edge look incompetent in comparison just like the PHB's viewed Firefox as incompetent because sites always worked in IE 6 so it must be the best browser.

      • Hardly. It's an Android feature that only works in Android and Google happen to call out in their own browser on their own website and that's about it.

        If you're going to call out an example of IE6ness then pick something like Accellerated Mobile Pages. That is something that affects multiple services across multiple devices and is not a standard in any form.

      • They are already the IE 6 of this decade. Notice on Android phones when you switch apps from YOUTUBE you see the video playing in the background?

        Well that is HTML 5.... err Google HTML 5 called Picture in Picture canvas. It is a proprietary Google CSS that web developers judge other browsers by. This is just one example well Google decides which standards are used and it makes Firefox and Edge look incompetent in comparison just like the PHB's viewed Firefox as incompetent because sites always worked in IE 6 so it must be the best browser.

        Embrace, extend, and extinguish ... Google is learning.

    • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Megol ( 3135005 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:52AM (#57635684)

      Owning? If Google creates an open standard and it is accepted then it is an open standard, nothing owned by Google or anyone else.
      Is this just another indication that the people here actually don't understand even the basics of the Internet (or even computing)? Scary.

    • Re:NOOOOOO! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:13AM (#57635872)

      I've had enough problems using Wireshark to find applications streaming data back to Microsoft and AWS. Last thing I need is have every network protocol multiplexed into an encrypted VPN so it's impossible to tell what is doing what. But that's Google.

    • by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @12:34PM (#57637970) Homepage

      zidium screeched:

      The last thing we want is Google owning yet another layer of the Web stack!

      Exactly which part of the IETF process gives Google "ownership" of QUIC? The part where a working group composed of networking engineers who work for a whole bunch of different companies have spent months figuring out how to bolt this new protocol onto the existing IP stack, or the part where it's been kicked upstairs to the full HTTP working group with a recommendation that it be adopted as the basis of the next iteration of the protocol? Because neither of those decisions is anywhere close to final, yet, and the current version of QUIC - which Google actually uses internally - works well.

      Or is it the fact that you're making shit up to trigger Google-haters's paranoia?

      Further down in this discussion [slashdot.org], ewhac provides the following link to a longish, quite intelligent discussion of what's wrong with TCP/IP in a ubiquitously-connected world (hint: the original design of the TCP protocol entirely failed to anticipate the mobile web - among many, many other shortcomings - and it now consists of a multi-layered kludge of, essentially, patches to enable it to function in an environment that is physically and logically completely unlike the bus-centric Ethernet networks it was developed to internetwork), and, just as importantly, an insightful discussion of why IPv6 has still not taken over the world, almost 30 years on, and probably never will:

      The world in which IPv6 was a good design [apenwarr.ca]

      Toward the end, the author talks about QUIC as a possible, elegant solution to the problem of creating a reliable, low-latency handover of session streams to enable a device whose IP address is constantly changing (i.e. - a mobile device that's, you know, in motion) to keep those data streams active in a much more elegant way than the current, provider-centric, dogshit-slow LTE protocol is capable of doing. And he goes to pains to point out that there are other possible solutions, as well, because that article is more than a year old, now, whereas the Mobile HTTP Working Group's recommendation that QUIC be the basis of the HTTP/3 standard is brand, spanking new.

      (Just to be clear, it's not LTE itself that has the latency problem. It's the way LTE copes with constantly-changing IP addresses at the client end, as its signal gets handed off from one cell tower to the next.)

      Mobile IP is a mess. Something has to be done about it. TCP is an increasingly-tottering kludge. Something has to be done about that, as well. IPv6 won't the panacea it's been advertised as, because its authors didn't anticipate the mobile Internet, either - and any fix is going to have to be a bolt-on, which is exactly the IPv4 problem IPv6 was supposed to eliminate.

      Look, folks, internetworking has always been a moving target. As Niels Bohr phrased the old, Danish proverb, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." That earlier generations of working network engineers failed to forsee the exact nature of the internetworked world we currently inhabit is profoundly unsurprising. But universal adoption of mobile, Internet nodes for personal communication is a reality with which the current crop of networking gurus must deal. Given that fact, we can either accept a hodgepodge of vendor-proprietary solutions, none of which is especially satisfactory, or tackle the problem as a general one that requires a universal, non-proprietary solution.

      The Mobile HTTP Working Group consists of experts who have been studying the problem for a long time, and who are focused on trying to solve real-world issues the solutions to which are only going to become more urgent as time goes on. By contrast, most of the bleating on this forum is from users who have little familiarity with those problems and no meaningful technical expertise to infor

  • SCTP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @07:53PM (#57634292)

    Those bay are guys... Why that compulsion to re-invent the Wheel? We'll never know.

    SCTP is available now, is well understood, HTTP(S) already runs on it. Is more resilient than TCP, does not have Head-of-Line issues... What's not to like?

    Oh, you can not write new papers on a protocol that already exists? Ah, and was Not-Invented-Here? Ok then...

    • Re:SCTP (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:12PM (#57634406)
      SCTP doesn't suit Google's needs. This isn't HTTP3, it's HTTP4, specifically HTTP4Google.
    • Re:SCTP (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @10:51PM (#57635088)

      There is a draft RFC that specifically addresses this question; A Comparison between SCTP and QUIC [ietf.org].

      Among the conclusions; QUIC provides better connection latency by eliminating handshake round trips. QUIC mandates encryption for everything in all phases including the initial handshake. QUIC has better compatibility with existing infrastructure because it rides on UDP and is therefore supported by nearly all "middleboxes," whereas SCTP is not universally supported. The connection ID concept allows QUIC connections to transparently survive IP address changes and NAT rebinding.

      Another rationale for QUIC over SCTP appears here: QUIC: Design Document and Specification Rationale [google.com]

      Again, connection latency is cited. Also, "bandwidth efficiency;" basically QUIC has less overhead than SCTP+DTLS and achieves the same result.

      • by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @11:24PM (#57635206) Homepage Journal

        yes and BOTH use UDP and you will see a LOT of problems with optimisations of links specifically sub sea fibre links

        but google et al dont seem to care since they have plenty of transit they control and CDN like features...

        good luck getting the telco's to use this and support it (they will just drop your packets) they make more by billing for the data and without control you wont know who is dropping your packets...

        • but google et al dont seem to care since they have plenty of transit they control and CDN like features...

          good luck getting the telco's to use this and support it (they will just drop your packets)

          So you think the telcos are going to compete with Google's long haul links by offering a worse service ?

        • but google et al dont seem to care

          Why should they? It's not their job to optimise infrastructure someone else runs, just like it's no the job of car manufacturers to install traffic lights at intersections when they introduced something that actually moves faster than a horse.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If we just assumed that everything will stay exactly the same no matter what we would not make much progress.

          It seems very likely that once adopted the internet backbone and transit providers will make an effort to properly support it, being an IETF standard and all.

    • SCTP is available now, is well understood, HTTP(S) already runs on it. Is more resilient than TCP, does not have Head-of-Line issues...

      The primary driver for change is round trip reduction. You can achieve QUIC parity in that regard using TCP TFO in conjunction with TLS features (session tickets). This is really nice because you can resume a "session" with no round trips before transmitting request to a server without requiring server side state be maintained.

      With these two used in conjunction HTTP 1.0 works just as well as HTTP 3.0 given you can send any number of requests any time you want without any inter-request HOL with no RTT over

    • by Megol ( 3135005 )

      This isn't a reinvention.

    • Why that compulsion to re-invent the Wheel?

      What you really need is one of these: https://www.snydersantiqueauto... [snydersantiqueauto.com] I mean why bother changing any part of the wheel design. That one spins right? So it is clear that there is no possible way it can be improved...

  • by Anonymous Coward

    At least from TFS.

    But .... Google. I consider anything they touch to be tainted and untrustworthy. I can't point to specifics in this case, but their name alone is enough to cast a whole pile of doubt.

    They were, after all, one of the companies actively cooperating with the NSA.

    • by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:02PM (#57634352) Homepage

      Also it appears they're spending a ridiculous amount of money solving something that isn't a problem with a solution that will definitely cause a massive amount of problems for everything and everyone it even comes close to touching.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Chewbacon ( 797801 )

      5 years from now: Google Announces End of Support for QUIP, End of Internet

      • by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:06AM (#57635572)
        They've already done that with HTTP/2 (SPDY). Now the protocol is designed to be a moving target. From the SCTP/QUIC comparison RFC: [ietf.org]

        A fundamental difference between QUIC and TCP or SCTP is that QUIC is a user space transport protocol, which allows rapid protocol revision without having to wait for system upgrades. To support rapid protocol revision, QUIC's connection setup goes through a negotiation process that involves determining the lowest common version supported between the two endpoints and a cryptographic handshake which incorporates TLS to provide a secure connection. This thing is an operating system, not a transport protocol. De-commoditizing of basic protocols was one of the stated means to exert control by the Microsoft of the Halloween Documents. Now the actors have changed, but it looks like the play is always the same.

  • by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @07:55PM (#57634306)

    How long has the IPv6 adoption been going on for now? 15 years? How's that been been going?
    Yeah, that slowly.

    • This is a fuck of a lot simpler than IPV6.

    • Fuck everything, let's do IPV8!

    • Introducing a new protocol that works with existing infrastructure is completely different than introducing a new protocol that can ride on existing routeable packets using existing hardware and a customised software stack.

      TLS was adopted quickly
      HSTS was adopted quickly
      AMP for worse (not better) was adopted quickly

  • by ndykman ( 659315 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @07:59PM (#57634342)

    Because, good enough for Google is good enough for everyone, right? And if it's not, they'll just do it anyway. Sure, I'm just old and grouchy, but I liked it when the IETF and the RFP process was a forum for very intense discussions with many researchers and industry leaders really working things out. Lately, it seems to be much more of a rubber stamp for big companies' technical ideas.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So if you click the RFC and read the end :

      The original authors of this specification were Robbie Shade and Mike
      Warres.

      A substantial portion of Mike's contribution was supported by
      Microsoft during his employment there.

      Author's Address

      Mike Bishop (editor)
      Akamai

      So you got Microsoft, Akamai and Google.

      Feel free also to see you submitted idea / feedbacks : https://github.com/quicwg/

    • Because, good enough for Google is good enough for everyone, right? And if it's not, they'll just do it anyway.

      Not to worry, this is from Google. What are the chances it ever makes it out of Beta and into actual use. :-)

  • to better connect the user with big brand ads.
  • by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:43PM (#57634572) Homepage Journal

    First, read this blog post from 2017: The world in which IPv6 was a good design [apenwarr.ca]. It's on the long-ish side, but you'll come out the other end somewhat smarter.

    Toward the end, the author makes an off-handed reference to QUIC, a then-experimental protocol that actually solves many of the issues that IPv6 was supposed to solve. Right now, TCP connections are hard-bound to IP addresses. If your IP address changes (as is extremely likely to happen on your mobile phone), your connection is broken and you have to reconnect -- a huge pain in the ass for streaming applications and network operators trying to paper over that. QUIC's big win (assuming it wasn't lost during revisions) is that it allows your network connections to survive IP address changes, since the endpoints are identified not by an IP address/port tuple, but rather by a GUID/port tuple. Downside: You lose (some? all?) anonymity, as your GUID is long-lived.

    So, no, this isn't some kluge Google chundered up last week. This has actually been under review by the IETF [ietf.org] for a couple years.

    • by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @09:01PM (#57634644)

      Downside: You lose (some? all?) anonymity, as your GUID is long-lived.

      That's a hell of a downside. Is there any way to protect your anonymity in such a system?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Using QUTor.

        http://www.qscience.com/doi/abs/10.5339/qfarc.2016.ICTPP2961

      • QUIC is apparently user-side, so not buried in your OS. I don't know how this will work in practice, but I'd imagine each process you run will have a different GUID. Further, I'd imagine it's possible to (say) tell your browser to quiesce all network activity, change GUIDs and start networks again. Any GUID-based sessions would have to re-authenticate, but you'd be on a new GUID.

        This aspect of QUIC does need some thinking about in implementations. You want the client to rotate GUIDs quite often, but I'll be

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's not really long lived. You can have one GUID per server, and can select how long you want it to persist for. The longer the lower the overhead when you request more data from that server, because the connection is already active and doesn't need to be re-started. This is similar to how HTTP/2 allows very long lived sessions.

        But you can also change it as often as you like (with small overhead), use different ones for different servers, that sort of thing.

        IPv6 is a similar issues, the usual solution to b

    • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @09:04PM (#57634658)

      QUIC's big win ... is that it allows your network connections to survive IP address changes, since the endpoints are identified not by an IP address/port tuple, but rather by a GUID/port tuple. Downside: You lose (some? all?) anonymity, as your GUID is long-lived.

      Hmm... I can't imagine why Google would want to develop a network protocol where devices/people could be persistently tracked by unique, persistent identifiers that would allow identification regardless of the applications used ...

      • Hmm... I can't imagine why Google would want to develop a network protocol where devices/people could be persistently tracked by unique, persistent identifiers that would allow identification regardless of the applications used ...

        Good point. Considering how good Google is at tracking people, making it absurdly easy to track people would be a huge boost to their competitors while only improving their own abilities a tiny bit.

        Also, couldn't the device be setup to change its GUID frequently if the user wanted to?

        • by swilver ( 617741 )

          Seems to me you could change the GUID on every connect to every port, or anytime a connection is idle you could close/reopen with a different GUID. Seems to me you could change it more often (and more easily) than your IP address.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd rather lose my connection than my anonymity.

    • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @09:14PM (#57634692) Homepage
      And what happens when you GUID is stolen or spoofed, you just know it will happen.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What happens when your TCP/HTTPS connection is stolen or spoofed, you just know it will happen.

        Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. TCP packets can be spoofed which is why HTTPS mitigates that possibility.

    • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      Downside: You lose (some? all?) anonymity, as your GUID is long-lived.

      Many IP addresses are long-lived anyway. And my home IP address links a dozen different devices.

      I haven't read the protocol, but wouldn't it be possible to cycle your GUID regularly? That seems like (slightly) better anonymity than IP addresses... not that either approach is designed for that purpose.

    • So quic is the corporation advertiser wet dream, you can be folllowed all over the web...?
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You know, for changing IP addresses, I just use mosh and tunnel over it. I think Google is solving the wrong problem here.

    • Downside: You lose (some? all?) anonymity, as your GUID is long-lived.

      On second thought, refreshing my browser was not that bad.

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      Kind of entertaining so far, but here's the first stupid:

      In truth, that really is just complicating things. Now your operating system has to first look up the ethernet address of 192.168.1.1, find out it's 11:22:33:44:55:66, and finally generate a packet with destination ethernet address 11:22:33:44:55:66 and destination IP address 10.1.1.1. 192.168.1.1 shows up nowhere in the packet; it's just an abstraction at the human level.

      Do you really want your routing table full of hard addresses like 11:22:33:44:55

      • by epine ( 68316 )

        Actually, that was all really good, but the author failed to notice that management functions were being overlaid on what he called a mere human abstraction.

        He probably has a good idea of how this management function could be done more elegantly in this alternate world, and maybe I could figure it for myself with more time and another read through.

        But it shouldn't have been neglected in the original narrative, because the view from elegance is not a first language for the reader until the reader has read an

  • by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Monday November 12, 2018 @08:45PM (#57634580)

    HTTP/2 shouldn't have bundled in TLS, and HTTP/3 shouldn't bundle in UDP. Keep the layers separate; interoperability depends on it.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Seeing that requires experience. I begin to think Google engineering is lacking that.

  • QUIC stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections" and is ... Google's attempt at rewriting the TCP protocol as an improved technology that combines HTTP/2, TCP, UDP, ...

    QUIC -- All the reliability of TCP with the unreliability of UDP.

  • I need to know how much of a QUIC packet has been set aside for ADs and/or trackers? /s

    • I need to know how much of a QUIC packet has been set aside for ADs and/or trackers?

      I think it's 28 bytes. It's a long lived, device specific, application independent QUIC. You don't need any other trackers using QUIC.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    They can serve ads directly bypassing many filter apps:

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/67hhc4/google_is_using_quic_protocol_to_serve_ads_in/ [google.com]

    I searched if this was possible while going through the RFC for QUIC and came across the part where it says HTTP3 will support extensions within individual connection requests.

  • I really don't want to spend the money on a new firewall just to support web browsing.
    • I really don't want to spend the money on a new firewall just to support web browsing.

      Nothing, which is kind of the point of this protocol.

  • Who needs congestion control? The network will be just fine when this is deployed large-scale...

  • This is really stupid. Google is changing and endangering working internet standards, just so they can safe a few bucks on connectivity. This should be resisted decisively.

    I think the problem here is both that Google has stopped caring about anything than themselves (if they ever did) and that they actually lack experience. They may just come with yet another new protocol in a few years, because this one did not do what they want after all. This is not good at all.

  • by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @06:35AM (#57636176) Journal

    Why does it have to ride UDP? Certainly most middle boxes will forward 'protocol unknown' over IP at least if instructed to do so. Seems like at least 4 bytes worth of source and destination port in the UDP header that is basically no needed; given quick has connection ids.

    I mean if we are going to both implementing a new transport layer; its going to be painful even if you do ride UDP. If we are doing this in the name of efficiency; we should at least do it right and not just burn 4 bytes per-packet b/c not doing tcp/udp is hard.

    • by Zan Lynx ( 87672 )

      Most "middle boxes" won't forward unknown protocols. They're too paranoid about security. Sure, they're willing to transmit absolutely anything over port 443. But an unknown IP type might be a HACKER! Oh noes!

      Not only that, lots of them break unknown TCP options. Or TCP windows. I remember years when TCP ECN and window sizes wouldn't work on random internet sites because of their short-sighted, STUPID firewall boxes.

      That's why QUIC is completely encrypted. Random hardware and software providers have proven

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