{"id":9472,"date":"2018-04-09T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.litespeedtech.com\/?p=9472"},"modified":"2018-04-09T06:00:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T10:00:53","slug":"ietf-101-london-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lswp.store\/index.php\/2018\/04\/09\/ietf-101-london-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes From the Road: IETF 101 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Notes<\/a><\/p>\n

I attended the IETF 101 Conference<\/a> in London a couple of weeks ago. This was my first time attending this conference. What follows are some of my recollections of people, talks, and events.<\/p>\n

Sunday 3\/18\/2018<\/h2>\n

My trip to the IETF 101 began with being stuck at the Frankfurt Airport due to an unseasonable snow.<\/p>\n

\"IETF<\/a>
My plane, just sitting there. And sitting some more.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I landed at the Heathrow Airport several hours later than planned and arrived at the venue a bit after 5 pm instead of 11 am. This resulted in me missing all the newbie-oriented meetings that I had been hoping to attend. I was able to catch most of the reception, which had free beer (plus) but little actual food (minus).<\/p>\n

I listened to the Hot RFC lightning talks instead. There were seventeen short (hence \u201clightning\u201d) talks squeezed into one and a half hours. Between QUIC over Satellite<\/a> by John Border and Web Packaging<\/a> by Jeffrey Yasskin, there was something for everyone.<\/p>\n

Monday 3\/19\/2018<\/h2>\n

Breakfast<\/h3>\n

I met Alan Frindell (whom I befriended last year at the Seattle Interim<\/a>) for breakfast at a nearby cafe. After a thought-provoking QUIC discussion, I headed off to the first session of the day. At the IETF Conference, there are six to eight sessions happening in parallel during each time slot, and so one has to choose which meeting to attend.<\/p>\n

First Session – TCP Maint<\/h3>\n

I sat in at the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions Working Group (WG) meeting. There were several presentations, a couple of which stood out to me.<\/p>\n

It turns out, RFC 793 (that\u2019s the TCP specification itself from 1981) contains three bugs<\/a> that have been known about for decades. Fernando Gont recommended that RFC 793 be updated with the fixes, while Lars Eggert, whom I heretofore have known only as the chair of the QUIC WG, proposed that an erratum be added to RFC 793 instead.<\/p>\n

Praveen Balasubramanian, another QUIC participant, presented TCP Fast Open<\/a> (TFO) deployment data as collected by Microsoft. TFO works well in some regions much better than in other regions. For example, TFO worked for only 1.5% of devices in China is compared with 21% success rate overall. See Praveen\u2019s presentation<\/a> for details.<\/p>\n

Second Session – QUIC<\/h3>\n

The first afternoon session was QUIC. After an update from the editors, we got to the much-anticipated meat of today\u2019s debate — the hand grenade that is QUIC over DTLS that Eric Rescorla (EKR) tossed into our midst<\/a> just several days ago.<\/p>\n

In his slides<\/a>, EKR enumerated the several issues with the Stream 0<\/em> approach. The root cause of the problems, according to EKR, is that TLS depends on QUIC, which in turn depends on TLS. One way to address this is to introduce special frames for crypto streams and crypto ACKs (CREAMs and CRACKs!). A cleaner solution is to use DTLS. The downside of using QUIC\/DTLS is that it would require significant changes to QUIC, and even some changes to DTLS.<\/p>\n

The discussion was framed using the following questions:<\/p>\n