And The Internet Created TCP … and It Was Bad … And So Google Created QUIC

QUIC — Quick UDP Internet Connections

It is well-known that the Internet has changed greatly since its birth, and the protocols that we still use are not fit for purpose. TCP — the protocol that basically built the Web — is a poor standard, and has the overhead of the three-way handshake, and then we have to handshake all of the data transmitted. Why can’t we just make a connection with another host, and then just send the data without adding all the additional things that TCP requires? Well, a chance is coming …

Go fire-up Wireshark, and open your Chrome browser, and have a look at the traffic in the trace, and you might be baffled, as where you would expect lots of TLS 1.2 traffic, there’s lots of QUIC UDP packets:

and if you follow a UDP stream you see the data contained in it:

So I’ll have to go back to my tutorials and re-write them to include QUIC (“Quick”). So what is it? Well…