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QUIC
charter-ietf-quic-01

The information below is for an older approved charter
Document Charter QUIC WG (quic) Snapshot
Title QUIC
Last updated 2019-03-27
State Approved
WG State Active
IESG Responsible AD Zaheduzzaman Sarker
Charter edit AD Magnus Westerlund
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-quic-01

The QUIC working group will provide a standards-track specification for
a UDP-based, stream-multiplexing, encrypted transport protocol, based
on pre-standardization implementation and deployment experience, and
generalizing the design described in
draft-hamilton-quic-transport-protocol,
draft-iyengar-quic-loss-recovery,
draft-shade-quic-http2-mapping, and
draft-thomson-quic-tls.

Key goals for QUIC are:

  • Minimizing connection establishment and overall transport latency
    for applications, starting with HTTP/2;
  • Providing multiplexing without head-of-line blocking;
  • Requiring only changes to path endpoints to enable deployment;
  • Enabling multipath and forward error correction extensions; and
  • Providing always-secure transport, using TLS 1.3 by default.

The work of the group will have five main focus areas, corresponding
to five core deliverables.

The first of these is the core transport work, which will describe
the wire format, along with the mechanisms for connection
establishment, stream multiplexing, data reliability, loss detection
and recovery, congestion control, version negotiation, and options
negotiation. Work on congestion control will describe use of a
standardized congestion controller as a default scheme for
QUIC. Defining new congestion control schemes is explicitly out of
scope for this group. QUIC is expected to support rapid,
distributed development and testing of features.

The second of these focus areas is security. This work will describe
how the protocol uses TLS 1.3 for key negotiation and will also
describe how those keys are used to provide confidentiality and
integrity protection of both application data and QUIC headers.
This work will ensure that QUIC has security and privacy
properties that are at least as good as a stack composed of TLS 1.3
using TCP (or MPTCP when using multipath).

The third focus area will describe mappings between specific
application protocols and the transport facilities of QUIC. The first
mapping will be a description of HTTP/2 semantics using QUIC,
specifically with the goal of minimizing web latency using QUIC. This
mapping will accommodate the extension mechanisms defined in the HTTP/2
specification. Upon completion of that mapping, additional protocols
may be added by updating this charter to include them.

The fourth focus area will extend core protocol facilities to enable
multipath capabilities for connection migration between paths and load
sharing across multiple paths.

The fifth focus area will provide an Applicability and Manageability
Statement, describing how, and under what circumstances, QUIC may be
safely used, and describing deployment and manageability implications
of the protocol.

Current practices for network management of transport protocols
include the ability to apply access control lists (ACLs), hashing of
flows for equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP), directional signaling
of flows, signaling of flow setup and teardown, and the ability to
export information about flows for accounting purposes. The QUIC
protocol need not be defined to enable each of these abilities, or
enable them in the same way as they are enabled by TCP when used
with TLS 1.3, but the working group must consider the impact of the
protocol on network management practices, reflecting the tensions
described in RFC 7258.

Extensions that will support partial reliability, and negotiation
and use of Forward Error Correction schemes, are out of scope in
this version of the working group charter.

Note that consensus is required both for changes to the current
protocol mechanisms and retention of current mechanisms. In particular,
because something is in the initial document set does not imply that
there is consensus around the feature or around how it is specified.

The QUIC working group will work closely with the HTTPbis working
group, especially on the QUIC mapping for HTTP/2.

In order to achieve the milestones set out below, the group expects
to make extensive use of interim meetings, especially in its first year.