A First Look at QUIC in the Wild

TL;DR

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of QUIC's adoption and usage in the wild, revealing rapid growth in infrastructure and significant traffic share, especially by Google.

Contribution

It offers the first broad assessment of QUIC deployment and traffic, including measurements from scans and real-world traffic traces, highlighting its increasing adoption.

Findings

QUIC-capable IPs have tripled to over 617,000 since 2016.

Approximately 161,000 domains are hosted on QUIC infrastructure.

QUIC accounts for up to 9.1% of Internet traffic, with Google contributing over 42%.

Abstract

For the first time since the establishment of TCP and UDP, the Internet transport layer is subject to a major change by the introduction of QUIC. Initiated by Google in 2012, QUIC provides a reliable, connection-oriented low-latency and fully encrypted transport. In this paper, we provide the first broad assessment of QUIC usage in the wild. We monitor the entire IPv4 address space since August 2016 and about 46% of the DNS namespace to detected QUIC-capable infrastructures. Our scans show that the number of QUIC-capable IPs has more than tripled since then to over 617.59 K. We find around 161K domains hosted on QUIC-enabled infrastructure, but only 15K of them present valid certificates over QUIC. Second, we analyze one year of traffic traces provided by MAWI, one day of a major European tier-1 ISP and from a large IXP to understand the dominance of QUIC in the Internet traffic mix. We find QUIC to account for 2.6% to 9.1% of the current Internet traffic, depending on the vantage point. This share is dominated by Google pushing up to 42.1% of its traffic via QUIC.