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21. Security Considerations

21. Security Considerations​

The goal of QUIC is to provide a secure transport for application protocols. Section 21.1 provides an overview of those security properties; subsequent sections discuss constraints and caveats regarding this protection.

21.1 Overview of Security Properties​

A complete security analysis of QUIC is provided in [QUIC-TLS].

21.1.1 Handshake​

QUIC relies on the TLS 1.3 handshake to establish secure communication.

21.1.2 Protected Packets​

Packet protection provides confidentiality and integrity protection for QUIC packets.

21.1.3 Connection Migration​

Connection migration allows an endpoint to continue a connection when its IP address changes.

21.2 Handshake Denial of Service​

QUIC is designed to reduce the effectiveness of amplification attacks by requiring both endpoints to demonstrate reachability at their advertised addresses.

21.3 Amplification Attack​

An attacker might be able to receive an address validation token from a server and reuse that token on multiple connections.

21.4 Optimistic ACK Attack​

An endpoint that acknowledges packets it has not received might cause a congestion controller to permit sending at rates beyond what the network supports.

21.5 Request Forgery Attacks​

QUIC can be used to send data to endpoints with which the sender has no established connection.

21.6 Slowloris Attacks​

Slowloris attacks [SLOWLORIS] try to tie up server resources by opening many connections and sending data slowly.

21.7 Stream Fragmentation and Reassembly Attacks​

An adversarial sender might intentionally not send portions of the stream data, causing the receiver to commit resources for the unsent data.

21.8 Stream Commitment Attack​

An adversarial endpoint can open a large number of streams, exhausting state on an endpoint.

21.9 Peer Denial of Service​

QUIC and TLS both contain frames or messages that have legitimate uses in some contexts, but these frames or messages can be abused to cause a peer to expend processing resources without having any observable impact on the state of the connection.

21.10 Explicit Congestion Notification Attacks​

An on-path attacker could manipulate ECN markings to cause endpoints to respond as though there were congestion on the path.

21.11 Stateless Reset Oracle​

A Stateless Reset oracle is an off-path attacker that can observe the presence of a connection between two endpoints.

21.12 Version Downgrade​

Attackers could interfere with version negotiation to force endpoints to use a version of QUIC that is vulnerable to attacks.

21.13 Targeted Attacks by Routing​

Deployments should limit the ability of an attacker to target a specific connection.

21.14 Traffic Analysis​

QUIC provides some protection against traffic analysis, but metadata about connections can still be observed by an attacker.