A significant amount of connection establishments on the web require a prior domain name resolution by the client. Especially on high-latency access networks, these DNS lookups cause a significant delay on the client's connection establishment with a server. To reduce the overhead of QUIC's connection establishment with prior DNS lookup on these networks, we propose a novel QuicSocks proxy. Basically, the client delegates the domain name resolution towards the QuicSocks proxy. Our results indicate, that colocating our proxy with real-world ISP-provided DNS resolvers provides great performance gains. For example, 10 of our 474 sample nodes distributed across ISP's in Germany would save at least 30ms per QUIC connection establishment. The design of our proposal aims to be readily deployable on the Internet by avoiding IP address spoofing, anticipating Network Address Translators and using the standard DNS and QUIC protocols. In summary, our proposal fosters a faster establishment of QUIC connections for clients on high-latency access networks.
Furthermore, Miniproxy @cite_2 can be used to accelerate TCP's connection establishment. This approach places a proxy between the client and the web server, which doubles the number of required TCP handshakes. Miniproxy can provide a faster TCP connection establishment in case of a favorable network topology and significant RTTs between client and web server. The QUIC protocol includes computationally expensive cryptographic handshakes causing a significant delay compared to TCP's handshake @cite_20 . Therefore, this approach seems less feasible when QUIC is used.
@cite_20 @cite_2
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TCP proxies are basic building blocks for many advanced middleboxes. In this paper we present Miniproxy, a TCP proxy built on top of a specialized minimalistic cloud operating system. Miniproxy's connection handling performance is comparable to that of full-fledged GNU Linux TCP proxy implementations, but its minimalistic footprint enables new use cases. Specifically, Miniproxy requires as little as 6 MB to run and boots in tens of milliseconds, enabling massive consolidation, on-the-fly instantiation and edge cloud computing scenarios. We demonstrate the benefits of Miniproxy by implementing and evaluating a TCP acceleration use case. QUIC is a performance-optimized secure transport protocol and a building block of the upcoming HTTP 3 standard. To protect against denial-of-service attacks, QUIC servers need to validate the IP addresses claimed by their clients. So far, the QUIC protocol conducts address validation for each hostname separately using validation tokens. In this work, we review this practice and introduce a new QUIC transport parameter to allow a shared address validation across hostnames. This parameter indicates to the client, that an issued validation token can be used to abbreviate the address validation when connecting to specific other hostnames. Based on trust-relations between real-world hostnames we evaluate the performance benefits of our proposal. Our results suggest that a shared address validation saves a round-trip time on almost 60 of the required handshakes to different hosts during the first loading of an average website. Assuming a typical transatlantic connection with a round-trip time of 90ms. We find that deploying our proposal reduces the delay overhead to establish all required connections for an average website by 142.2ms. QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) is a new multiplexed and secure transport atop UDP, designed from the ground up and optimized for HTTP 2 semantics. While built with HTTP 2 as the primary application protocol, QUIC builds on decades of transport and security experience, and implements mechanisms that make it attractive as a modern general- purpose transport. QUIC provides multiplexing and flow control equivalent to HTTP 2, security equivalent to TLS, and connection semantics, reliability, and congestion control equivalent to TCP. This draft documents the early deployment of the QUIC protocol prior to standardization. Small TCP flows make up the majority of web flows. For them, the TCP three-way handshake represents a significant delay overhead. The TCP Fast Open (TFO) protocol provides zero round-trip time (0-RTT) handshakes for subsequent TCP connections to the same host. In this paper, we present real-world privacy and performance limitations of TFO. We investigated its deployment on popular websites and browsers. We found that a client revisiting a web site for the first time fails to use an abbreviated TFO handshake about 40 of the time due to web server load-balancing. Our analysis further reveals significant privacy problems in the protocol design and implementation. Network-based attackers and online trackers can exploit these shortcomings to track the online activities of users. As a countermeasure, we introduce a novel protocol called TCP Fast Open Privacy (FOP). It overcomes the performance and privacy limitations of TLS over TFO by utilizing a custom TLS extension. TCP FOP prevents tracking by network attackers and impedes third-party tracking, while still allowing for 0-RTT handshakes as in TFO. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented the proposed protocol. Our measurements indicate that TCP FOP outperforms TLS over TFO when websites are served from multiple IP addresses.