Innovative New Technology For Sending Data Over The Internet Published As Open Standard

WILMINGTON, Del., June 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Internet transport technology that improves web application performance, security, and privacy has been published as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Already used by a range of Internet services, an initial version of QUIC was designed and tested by Google and then proposed to IETF for standardization. Over the past 5 years it was reviewed, redesigned and improved in the IETF, incorporating a broad range of input from across the industry. QUIC is an important example of a range of innovation in core Internet technologies underway in the IETF. While QUIC is a general transport protocol, the IETF will also soon release HTTP/3, the first application protocol designed for use over QUIC.

"While widely-known IETF standards such as TCP have served the Internet's growth and evolution for decades, technologies like QUIC are more extensible to enable future innovation," said IETF Transport Area Director Martin Duke. "Beyond QUIC, IETF participants have been exploring a broad range of ideas in Internet technologies, such as the next version of Web Transport, HTTP/3, the Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S) service architecture, and Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN)."

QUIC provides a new building block that can improve application performance by reducing latency and enabling the multiple data streams needed by many modern Web services and other applications. QUIC applies encryption at the transport layer, instead of above it, substantially improving its privacy and security properties.

An important part of ensuring the rapid deployment of QUIC has been parallel development and testing of running code as it was developed. IETF Hackathons have helped implementers find problems and improve the standard before its final publication. While "running code" has long been a core principle of the IETF, it has been increasingly important in recent IETF standards development efforts like QUIC.

"I think the hackathons were great," said Nick Banks, a QUIC developer from Microsoft. "They encouraged implementations to make measured progress towards a common goal. This, in turn, led to a number of spec bugs being found and fixed early on in the process. I have no doubt that the whole standardization process would have taken longer without those interops."

The QUIC Working Group continues its work by improving the protocol's manageability and deployability. Other working groups are expanding QUIC to new use cases and building APIs to make it easier for applications to use.

More information about a broad range of work on new Internet transport protocols is available in a recent post by the IETF Transport Area Directors on the IETF Blog.

Industry Support for QUIC

Facebook
"Over 75% of Facebook's traffic is now using QUIC. We're excited to be able to deploy this technology at scale, bringing the performance and reliability improvements of QUIC to the billions of people who use our products everyday. QUIC and the work done by the IETF enable us to move fast and continuously innovate at the network layer in ways which were never possible with TCP."

• Mike Schroepfer, CTO, Facebook

Akamai
"QUIC is already improving the user experience and the efficiency of the Internet, and improving it more for the most challenging connections.  But the real value remains to be seen. An encrypted transport means that new technology can be tested and deployed rapidly, just by updating your browser. QUIC isn't just today's great idea -- it's what will make tomorrow's great idea possible."

• Mike Bishop, Principal Architect, Akamai

Microsoft
"Microsoft is an active participant and driver of QUIC in the industry as well as the IETF and has open sourced its implementation. MsQuic brings performance and security improvements to many important networking scenarios particularly reduced tail latency and fast secure connection setup for our online services. Microsoft is committed to deploying HTTP/3 and QUIC at scale and fostering innovation in Internet protocols to deliver secure, reliable, and performant connectivity experiences for our users."

• Krishna Ganugapati, VP Engineering, Microsoft

Cloudflare
"QUIC is a major advancement in transport protocols. Cloudflare believes strongly that its security and mobility features give it the potential to become the dominant transfer protocol on the Internet. For this reason, we deployed QUIC and HTTP/3 early and made it available for all. We have invested our learnings back into the IETF standards and our open source implementation — quiche — to help build a better Internet."

• John Graham-Cumming, Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare

Ericsson
"We are excited to see the QUIC specification published by the IETF. The development of QUIC has been a prominent example of rapid innovation and evolution in the area of Internet transport protocols. More importantly, QUIC sets the base that will enable and facilitate future innovation and evolution. When it comes to deployments QUIC already represents a large share of the traffic carried by mobile networks Ericsson has built, and we expect that share to still grow significantly in the future. At Ericsson, we believe in the network as a platform where applications and the network itself work together to provide the best performance for the end user. We are particularly happy that QUIC also provides features designed to assist in the performance analysis process in the network."

• Magnus Frodigh, Head of Ericsson Research

F5
"F5 is privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to the significant work at the IETF to establish HTTP/3 as the new web standard. Our BIG-IP and NGINX customers will benefit from the performance and security improvements of this new protocol, and we are poised to offer additional support as future enhancements are rolled out."

• Geng Lin, EVP & CTO, F5 Networks

Fastly
"Fastly has been invested in helping make QUIC a success from its early days, and its ratification is a major milestone for the Internet ecosystem. QUIC and HTTP/3 are available on our network and improve the experience of our customers and their users around the globe, especially those with a less-than-reliable Internet connection. We believe the real potential of QUIC is in accelerating an entirely new generation of Internet innovation. Fastly is already extending and building on QUIC to solve novel infrastructure and technology problems, and we are excited to continue contributing to this space in our mission to build a faster, more resilient, more trusted Internet."

• Tyler McMullen, CTO, Fastly

"QUIC began as a small experiment at Google in 2013 and now carries the majority of Google's traffic. The IETF process resulted in a dramatically different protocol with better functionality, performance, and security. The clean separation between QUIC transport and HTTP/3 sets the stage for decades of transport and application innovation.  Due to the improved latency, HTTP/3 was default enabled for all Google sites and in Chrome in November 2020. We look forward to the continued growth of HTTP/3 as others default enable it as well."

• Ian Swett, Web Performance Lead, Google

About the Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the Internet's premier technical standards body. It gathers a large international community of network designers, engineers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. The IETF seeks broad participation. The work of the IETF takes place online, largely through email lists, reducing barriers to participation and maximizing contributions from around the world. More than 120 IETF working groups are organized by topic into areas such as routing, transport, and security. For more information, see: http://www.ietf.org/about/

Contact:

Greg Wood
+17036253917
[email protected]

SOURCE IETF Administration LLC

Related Links

www.ietf.org