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When QUIC isn't so Quick

August 15, 2017

Busy traffic in Hong Kong city at night.jpeg

In the beginning, SPDY, an open networking protocol developed primarily at Google for transporting web content was supported on Internet Explorer and Chrome web browsers through a default setting. 

The core developers of SPDY were involved in the development of HTTP/2. Back in February 2015, Google announced that as a result of the final ratification of the HTTP/2 standard, support for SPDY would be deprecated, and that support for SPDY was withdrawn completely in 2016.

Let me show you how to disable SPDY in Internet Explorer and QUIC in Chrome.

A QUIC Review

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections, pronounced quick) is an experimental transport layer network protocol designed at Google and implemented back in 2012-2013.

QUIC supports a set of multiplexed connections between two endpoints over User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and provides security protection equivalent to TLS/SSL. The concept is very straightforward; to create a UDP based protocol that has reduced connection and transport latency, and bandwidth estimation in each direction to avoid congestion.

QUIC's main goal is to improve the perceived performance of connection-oriented web applications that are currently using TCP.

Improving TCP is a long-term goal for Google and QUIC is positioning itself to be nearly equivalent as an independent TCP connection, but with greatly reduced latency. QUIC is also trying to be better than SPDY-like stream-multiplexing support.

SPDY A Short History

SPDY (pronounced speedy) is an open networking protocol developed primarily at Google for transporting web content. SPDY manipulates HTTP traffic, with particular goals of reducing web page load latency and improving web security. SPDY achieved reduced latency through compression, multiplexing, and prioritization, although this depends on a combination of network and website deployment conditions. The name "SPDY" is a trademark of Google and unlike much of the tech world, it's not an acronym

The core developers of SPDY were also involved in the later development of HTTP/2. In February 2015, Google announced that after the final ratification of the HTTP/2 standard, support for SPDY would be deprecated, and that support for SPDY would be withdrawn completely the following year.

Since SPDY is supported by default settings on Internet Explorer and Chrome (I’m not sure about other browsers), I'd like to show you how to disable either one.

There have been reports where QUIC may have issues with NAT’ing, proxies or traversing certain firewall configurations, so being able to turn it off should help when troubleshooting.

Internet Explorer Disablement

Staring off with the easier browser of the two. Navigate to:

Internet Options ->

Advanced tab and scroll down to the HTTP settings section.

Then simply uncheck the SPDY/3 option:

Chrome Disablement

Start Chrome and in the address bar type chrome://flags/

Then press Ctrl+F and type QUIC to quickly get to the QUIC section:

Results

Here's an example of two traces of the same task.

The first one is with QUIC enabled.

This second one is with QUIC disabled.

And that’s how you disable QUIC in Chrome and SPDY in Internet Explorer.

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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