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Comment by DeepYogurt | Hacker News Reader

The title really should be "UDP as a solution to protocol ossification". QUIC makes the point that you can develop a new transport-ish layer over UDP. Developing a new protocol on raw IP packets apparently gets blocked by firewall boxes around the world.

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My take-away from the article is actually "encryption as a solution to protocol ossification". If some data (headers, etc.) is available as clear-text, there will be routers that act on it and possibly misbehave or block traffic when they encounter new patterns.

So the article suggests that making it impossible for routers to inspect any protocol-specific information (via encryption) helps with this problem. Routers can't act on fields they can't read.

But then you have the whole industry of "security appliances" against you, which do want to have a look, and which do want to MITM everything - ironically arguing that this makes everything safer, depite becoming themselves a huge attack surface.

Ya but they're wrong.

They're interested in business security at least, security of their own business I mean.

Ya I agree with the encryption statement for sure. My only complaint with the title is that UDP was used as the solution to not being able to make QUIC on top of IP directly (which is madness really, but also not the QUIC developers problem).

It's not as though udp has much overhead; it's pretty damn close to straight IP

The beauty of it is that UDP is not even really a protocol, it's just a few additions (sport and dport) on top of IP. The RFC is only 3 pages long. So it's not like UDP is going to get in the way of your new protocol if you design on top of it.

While I think you are correct in that IP seems more stuck by middleboxes (SCTP is unreliable), I think any protocol whether it be over UDP or TCP can be subject to ossification. QUIC seems to have some useful properties to prevent this, such as the headers being encrypted. I could imagine alternative UDP protocols not doing this and causing more ossification.

Also encryption:

> The first byte of the clear data was a flags field which, he said, was promptly ossified by a middlebox vendor, leading to packets being dropped when a new flag was set.

[...]

> The only defense against ossification of network protocols by middleboxes, he said at the conclusion of the talk, is encryption.

Well, it shows that Google can develop a new transport layer protocol over UDP.

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