Application specific UDP-based protocols have always been around, but with traffic volumes that are largely rounding errors. Recently the idea of using UDP has become a lot more respectable. IETF has started the ball rolling on standardizing QUIC, Google's UDP-based combination of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2. And Facebook published Linux kernel patches to add an encrypted UDP encapsulation of TCP, TOU (Transports over UDP). On a very high level, the approaches are dramatically different.

QUIC is a totally new design that can really experiment on the protocol level, but requires implementation to start from scratch. Some of the new features are compelling (e.g. proper multiplexing of multiple data streams), a few I have my doubts on (e.g. forward error correction). TOU is a conservative evolution, and pretty much just includes one actual new feature. But it can fully leverage the host TCP stack on the server. The client would still require a user space TCP stack and user space TOU encapsulation.

But despite the difference in designs, the goals are very similar. Both proposals attempt to speed up protocol evolution by decoupling the protocol from the client OS, and moving it to the application. (The companies that designed these protocols happen to control the servers and the client application program, but not really the client OS). They'd also both add support for connection migration in a way that should more deployable than multipath TCP. It's hard to argue against either of these ideas.

And then there's the third big commonality. Both proposals encrypt and authenticate the layer 4 headers. This is the bit that I'm uneasy about.

The recent movement to get all traffic encrypted has of course been great for the Internet. But the use of encryption in these protocols is different than in TLS. In TLS, the goal was to ensure the privacy and integrity of the payload. It's almost axiomatic that third parties should not be able to read or modify the web page you're loading over HTTPS. QUIC and TOU go further. They encrypt the control information, not just the payload. This provides no meaningful privacy or security benefits.

Instead the apparent goal is to break the back of middleboxes [0]. The idea is that TCP can't evolve due to middleboxes and is pretty much fully ossified. They interfere with connections in all kinds of ways, like stripping away unknown TCP options or dropping packets with unknown TCP options or with specific rare TCP flags set. The possibilities for breakage are endless, and any protocol extensions have to jump through a lot of hoops to try to minimize the damage.

It's almost an extension of the end-to-end principle. Not only should protocols be defined such that functionality that can't be implemented correctly in the network is defined in the application. Protocols should in addition be defined such that it's not possible for the network to know anything about the traffic, lest somebody try to add any features at that level. Dumb pipes all the way!

It's a compelling story. I'm even pretty sympathetic to it, since in my line of work I see a lot of cases where obsolete or badly configured middleboxes cause major performance degradation. (See this HN comment for an example).

But let's take the recent findings about the deployability of TCP Fast Open as an example. The headline number is absolutely horrific: 20% failure rate! But actually that appears to be 20% where TCP Fast Open can't be successfully negotiated, not 20% where connections fail. And this is for the absolute worst case; it's not just new TCP options, but effectively modifies the TCP state machine for the handshake. I've implemented a bunch of TCP extensions over the years. TCP Fast Open was by far the hardest to get right.

Compared to the reported 8% failure rates to negotiate a QUIC connection, that number looks totally reasonable. (In both cases there is a fallback to negotiate a different type of connection, and blacklists will be used to directly go to the fallback method the next time around). But somehow one of these is deemed acceptable, while the other is a sign of terminal ossification. [1].

What you lose with encrypted headers

What's wrong with encrypted transport headers? One possible argument is that middleboxes actually serve a critical function in the network, and crippling them isn't a great idea. Do you really want a world where firewalls are unviable? But I work on middleboxes, so of course I'd say that. (Disclaimer: these are my own opinions, not my employer's). So let's ignore that. Even so, readable headers have one killer feature: troubleshooting.

The typical network problem that my team gets to troubleshoot is some kind of traffic either not working at all, or working slower than it should be. So something like the following [2]:

Users are complaining that Youtube videos only play in SD, but are choppy in HD.

Speedtest is showing 10Mbps on an LTE connection that should be able to do 50Mbps.

Large FTP transfers between machines in Germany and Singapore are only getting speeds of 2Mbps.

Uploads over a satellite link are so slow that they stall and get terminated rather than ever finish.

To debug issues like this I start with a packet capture from the points in the network I have access to. Most of the time that's just a point in the middle (e.g. a mobile operator's core network). From just one trace, we can determine things such as the following:

Determine packet loss rates (on both sides, i.e. packets lost on the server -> core hop, and on the core -> client hop).

Correlate packet loss with other events.

Detect packet reordering rates (on both sides).

Detect packet corruption rates (on both sides).

Determine RTTs continuously over the lifetime of a connection, not just during a connection handshake (e.g. to use queuing as a congestion signal to establish the downlink as the bottleneck).

Estimate sender congestion windows from observed delivery rates (to determine whether congestion control is the bottleneck).

Inspect the TCP options (e.g. window scaling, mss) and the receive windows to determine whether the software on the client or the server is the bottleneck.

Distinguish between pure control packets and data packets (e.g. to distinguish multiple separate HTTPS requests within a single TCP connection).

Detect the presence of middleboxes that are interfering with the connection. (But only occasionally; more often you'll need multiple traces for this).

We do most this with some specialized tools. But it's essentially no different from opening up the trace in Wireshark, following a connection with disappointing performance, and figuring out what happened. That's something that every network engineer probably does on a regular basis.

With encrypted control information you can't figure out any of this. The only solid data you get is the throughput (not even the goodput). For anything more you, need traces from multiple points in the network. Those are hard to get, sometimes it's even outright impossible. And to do the analysis, you need to correlate those multiple traces with each other. That's a significantly higher barrier than just opening up Wireshark. In practice the network becomes a total black box, even to the people who are supposed to keep it running. That's not going to be a great place to be in.

Conclusion

To conclude, I think encrypting the L4 headers is a step too far. If these protocols get deployed widely enough (a distinct possibility with standardization), the operational pain will be significant.

There would be a reasonable middle ground where the headers are authenticated but not encrypted. That prevents spoofing and modifying packets, but still leaves open the possibility of understanding what's actually happening to the traffic.

Footnotes