Subject: An update on QUIC-Tracker, a test suite for QUIC

From: Maxime Piraux <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2018 09:22:55 +0000

Dear all,

I am working at UCLouvain's IP Networking Lab on a test suite for QUIC 
called QUIC-Tracker. Since its initial announcement in March 2018, I 
would like to share with you several news about the tool.

First, QUIC-Tracker is now funded as a research project of the lab. I am 
working on several improvements for the tool since August 2018. A new 
manner of visualising the test results can be found at 
https://quic-tracker.info.ucl.ac.be/grid. This grid reports the tests 
that passed and differentiates the tests that failed from the tests that 
could not execute. Three new tests involves the HTTP/3 mapping. One 
tests the support of a single HTTP/3 request. A second verifies that the 
server processes the encoder stream and supports table updates. The 
third verifies that the server responds to an HTTP/3 request without 
being able to use the QPACK streams. Tests for key updates and 
connection ID retirement were also added.

We presented the tool and some results we gathered over a semester in 
the paper "Observing the Evolution of QUIC Implementations". This paper 
has been accepted at the EPIQ workshop of CoNEXT 2018. A version has 
already been published and can be found at 
https://quic-tracker.info.ucl.ac.be/blog/.

The QUIC-Tracker project has now a blog, 
https://quic-tracker.info.ucl.ac.be/blog/. I write posts there to 
explain the tool in more details, how to use it and how to extend it. A 
first blog post explains all the steps needed to add a scenario to the 
test suite, 
https://quic-tracker.info.ucl.ac.be/blog/tutorial/2018/11/21/tutorial-creating-a-scenario.html. 
I believe it is a complete introduction on the usage of the tool.

During the IETF 103, I read discussions about tools to promote 
interoperability. A few persons mentioned the need for a "packetdrill 
for QUIC". While it might be difficult to directly adapt packetdrill 
itself to QUIC, its methodology can certainly be reused. I think 
QUIC-Tracker can be a valuable starting point for such a tool. It has 
been designed to be able to finely control its output while being able 
to delegate some mechanisms not part of the test. QUIC is arguably more 
complex than TCP and thus more complex to script. For example, the 
handshake validation can take two forms, i.e. stateless retry or the 
receipt of a Handshake packet. A test that focuses on mechanisms used 
after the handshake should not need to explicitly handle these two cases.
I think it is worth having a look at what we achieved so far with 
QUIC-Tracker when considering building a new packetdrill-like tool.

Best regards,
Maxime Piraux

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From: Jana Iyengar <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2018 19:17:12 -0800

Thanks for the update, Maxime. This is a promising tool, and it would be
great to see this be brought to one of the interops. Are you or someone
from the lab planning to participate (locally or remotely) at an upcoming
interop?

---

From: Maxime Piraux <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2018 13:44:37 +0000

I intend to participate remotely to the January interop to some extend. 
The timezone differences being important and the SIGCOMM paper 
submission deadline being very close to this interop, I cannot confirm 
my involvement at this point.

Nevertheless, we will be attending the next IETF in March. This may be 
the best opportunity to discuss in detail.

Regards,
Maxime

Le 4/12/18 à 04:17, Jana Iyengar a écrit :
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 1:24 AM Maxime Piraux<[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>