2021/07/13 by Konrad Yuri Gbur, Gbur, Konrad Yuri, Florian Tschorsch +1
Computer Science · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Network Packet Processing and Optimization #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.05939
openalex publication_date 2021/07/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The QUIC protocol is a new approach to combine encryption and transport layer stream abstraction into one protocol to lower latency and improve security. However, the decision to encrypt transport layer functionality may limit the capabilities of firewalls to protect networks. To identify these limitations we created a test environment and analyzed generated QUIC traffic from the viewpoint of a middlebox. This paper shows that QUIC indeed exposes traditional stateful firewalls to UDP hole punching bypass attacks. On the contrary we show the robustness against censorship of QUIC through the encrypted transport layer design and analyze the capabilities to re-gain stateful tracking capabilities by deep packet inspection of the few exposed QUIC header fields.