Quinn

Quinn is an implementation of the QUIC transport protocol undergoing standardization by the IETF. It is suitable for experimental use. This repository contains the following crates:

quinn contains a high-level async API based on tokio, see quinn/examples/ for usage. This will be used by most Rust developers. (Basic benchmarks are included.)
quinn-proto contains a deterministic state machine of the protocol which performs no I/O internally and is suitable for use with custom event loops (and potentially a C or C++ API).
quinn-h3 contains an implementation of HTTP 3 and QPACK. It is split internally in a deterministatic state machine and a tokio-based high-level async API.
bench contains some extra benchmarks without any framework.
interop contains tooling that helps the Quinn team run interoperability tests.

Quinn is the subject of a RustFest Paris (May 2018) presentation; you can also get the slides (and the animation about head-of-line blocking). Video of the talk is available on YouTube. Since this presentation, Quinn has been merged with quicr, another Rust implementation.

All feedback welcome. Feel free to file bugs, requests for documentation and any other feedback to the issue tracker.

Quinn was created and is maintained by Dirkjan Ochtman and Benjamin Saunders.

Features

Simultaneous client/server operation
Ordered and unordered stream reads for improved performance
Works on stable Rust, tested on Linux, macOS and Windows
Pluggable cryptography, with a standard implementation backed by rustls and ring
Application-layer datagrams for small, unreliable messages

Status

Usage Notes

Buffers

A Quinn endpoint corresponds to a single UDP socket, no matter how many connections are in use. Handling high aggregate data rates on a single endpoint can require a larger UDP buffer than is configured by default in most environments. If you observe erratic latency and/or throughput over a stable network link, consider increasing the buffer sizes used. For example, you could adjust the SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF options of the UDP socket to be used before passing it in to Quinn. Note that some platforms (e.g. Linux) require elevated privileges or modified system configuration for a process to increase its UDP buffer sizes.

Certificates

By default, Quinn clients validate the cryptographic identity of servers they connect to. This prevents an active, on-path attacker from intercepting messages, but requires trusting some certificate authority. For many purposes, this can be accomplished by using certificates from Let's Encrypt for servers, and relying on the default configuration for clients.

For some cases, including peer-to-peer, trust-on-first-use, deliberately insecure applications, or any case where servers are not identified by domain name, this isn't practical. Arbitrary certificate validation logic can be implemented by enabling the dangerous_configuration feature of rustls and constructing a Quinn ClientConfig with an overridden certificate verifier by hand.

When operating your own certificate authority doesn't make sense, rcgen can be used to generate self-signed certificates on demand. To support trust-on-first-use, servers that automatically generate self-signed certificates should write their generated certificate to persistent storage and reuse it on future runs.

Running the Examples

$ cargo run --example server ./
$ cargo run --example client https://localhost:4433/Cargo.toml

This launches a HTTP 0.9 server on the loopback address serving the current working directory, with the client fetching ./Cargo.toml. By default, the server generates a self-signed certificate and stores it to disk, where the client will automatically find and trust it.

Development

The quinn-proto test suite uses simulated IO for reproducibility and to avoid long sleeps in certain timing-sensitive tests. If the SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable is set, the tests will emit UDP packets for inspection using external protocol analyzers like Wireshark, and NSS-compatible key logs for the client side of each connection will be written to the path specified in the variable.

Matthias247/quinn