An Analysis of QUIC Connection Migration in the Wild

TL;DR

This paper examines the real-world deployment of QUIC connection migration, revealing gaps in support among popular web servers despite QUIC's rapid adoption.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive Internet-wide analysis of QUIC connection migration support and highlights deployment challenges.

Findings

Many popular servers lack support for connection migration.

QUIC deployment is rapidly increasing but migration support lags.

Significant gaps in migration support could impact future applications.

Abstract

As QUIC gains attention, more applications that leverage its capabilities are emerging. These include defenses against on-path IP tracking and traffic analysis. However, the deployment of the underlying required support for connection migration remains largely unexplored. This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the support of the QUIC connection migration mechanism over the Internet. We perform Internet-wide scans revealing that despite a rapid evolution in the deployment of QUIC on web servers, some of the most popular destinations do not support connection migration yet.