A Quic(k) Security Overview: A Literature Research on Implemented Security Recommendations
Built on top of UDP, the relatively new QUIC protocol serves as the baseline for modern web protocol stacks. Equipped with a rich feature set, the protocol is defined by a 151 pages strong IETF standard complemented by several additional documents. Enabling fast updates and feature iteration, most QUIC implementations are implemented as user space libraries leading to a large and fragmented ecosystem. This work addresses the research question, “if a complex standard with a large number of different implementations leads to an insecure ecosystem?”. The relevant RFC documents were studied and “Security Consideration” items describing conceptional problems were extracted. During the research, 13 popular production ready QUIC implementations were compared by evaluating 10 security considerations from RFC9000. While related studies mostly focused on the functional part of QUIC, this study confirms that available QUIC implementations are not yet mature enough from a security point of view.
A Quic(k) Security Overview: A Literature Research on Implemented Security Recommendations
ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
| Authors: | Stefan Tatschner, Sebastian N. Peters, David Emeis, John Morris, and Thomas Newe |
| Year/month: | 2023/8 |
| Booktitle: | ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security |
| Pages: | 1 - 8 |
| Fulltext: | click here |
Abstract |
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| Built on top of UDP, the relatively new QUIC protocol serves as the baseline for modern web protocol stacks. Equipped with a rich feature set, the protocol is defined by a 151 pages strong IETF standard complemented by several additional documents. Enabling fast updates and feature iteration, most QUIC implementations are implemented as user space libraries leading to a large and fragmented ecosystem. This work addresses the research question, “if a complex standard with a large number of different implementations leads to an insecure ecosystem?”. The relevant RFC documents were studied and “Security Consideration” items describing conceptional problems were extracted. During the research, 13 popular production ready QUIC implementations were compared by evaluating 10 security considerations from RFC9000. While related studies mostly focused on the functional part of QUIC, this study confirms that available QUIC implementations are not yet mature enough from a security point of view. | |
Bibtex:
@inproceedings {author = { Stefan Tatschner and Sebastian N. Peters and David Emeis and John Morris and Thomas Newe},
title = { A Quic(k) Security Overview: A Literature Research on Implemented Security Recommendations },
year = { 2023 },
month = { August },
booktitle = { ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security },
pages = { 1 - 8 },
url = { https://doi.org/10.1145/3600160.3605164 },
}