Four researchers from UCLouvain will attend IETF118 in Prague. IETF meetings are important for researchers who develop or enhance Internet protocols because they encourage interactions with engineers who deploy these protocols at a large scale. At IETF118, UCLouvain contributions will focus on QUIC, TCP, TLS and BGP.

François Michel proposes in draft-michel-quic-fec a QUIC extension to support Forward Erasure Correction (FEC). This enables QUIC to carry latency sensitive services and leverages all the lessons that he learned in adding FEC support in three different QUIC implementations during his PhD.

In parallel, Multipath QUIC continues to progress with a new version of draft-ietf-quic-multipath with minor changes. In contrast with Multipath TCP, the current version of Multipath QUIC does not allow a client to learn the different addresses of a server. In draft-piraux-quic-additional-addresses, Maxime Piraux proposes a QUIC extension to exchange this information and notably support dual-stack servers.

Louis Navarre works on enabling QUIC to use IP multicast to carry data to a large number of receivers. He has proposed a new design and experimented with an implementation in Cloudflare’s quiche. He has contributed some of his findings to the Multicast QUIC draft.

In addition to being used to support HTTP/3 or DNS, QUIC is also proposed to support other types of services. Thomas Wirtgen and Nicolas Rybowski have shown that it is possible to use QUIC to support BGP and OSPF. From a security viewpoint, one of the benefits of QUIC over TCP is that QUIC can counter packet injection packets. TCP can counter such attacks by using the TCP-AO option to authenticate the TCP packets. Unfortunately, TCP-AO is cumbersome for network operators since they need to specify security keys for their BGP sessions. Maxime Piraux and Thomas Wirtgen propose in draft-piraux-tcp-ao-tls to use the TLS handshake to automatically derive the TCP-AO security keys. Thomas Wirtgen proposes in draft-wirtgen-bgp-tls to use TLS over TCP to support BGP and leverage this extension for TCP-AO.