[geoctl]

While WireGuard makes every sense for an FPGA due to its minimal design, I wonder why there isn't much interest in using QUIC as a modern tunneling protocol, especially for corporate use cases. QUIC already provides an almost complete WireGuard-alternative via its datagrams that can be easily combined with TUN devices and custom authentication schemes (e.g. mTLS, bearer tokens obtained via OAuth2 and OIDC authentication, etc...) to build your own VPN. While I am not sure about performance, at least when compared to kernel-mode WireGuard, since QUIC is obviously a more complex state machine that's running in userspace and it depends on the implementation and optimizations offered by the OS (e.g. GRO/GSO), QUIC isn't just a yet another tunneling protocol, it actually offers lots of benefits such as working well with dynamic endpoints with DNS instead of just using static IP addrs, it uses modern TLSv1.3 and therefore it's compliant with FIPS for example, it uses AES which can be accelerated by the underlying hardware (e.g. AES-NI), it currently has implementations in almost every major programming language, it can work well in the future with proxies and load balancers, you can bring your own custom, more fine-grained authentication scheme (e.g. bearer tokens, mTLS, etc...), it masquerades as just another QUIC/HTTP3 traffic that's used by almost all major websites now and therefore less susceptible to dropping by any nodes in between, and other less obvious benefits such as congestion control and PMTUD.

[sugarpimpdorsey]

Why would anyone want to use a complex kludge like QUIC and be at the mercy of broken TLS libraries, when Wireguard implementations are ~ 5k LOC and easily auditable?

Have all the bugs in OpenSSL over the years taught us nothing?

[dpeckett]

FWIW QUIC enforces TLS 1.3 and modern crypto. A lot smaller surface area and far fewer foot-guns. Combined with memory safe TLS implementations in Go and Rust I think it's fair to say things have changed since the heartbleed days.

[alphazard]

QUIC allows identities to be signing keys, which are used to build public key infrastructure. You need to be able to sign things to do web-of-trust, or make arbitrary attestations.

Wireguard has a concept of identity as long term key pairs, but since the algorithm is based on Diffie-Hellman, and arriving at a shared secret ephemeral key, it's only useful for establishing active connections. The post-quantum version of Wireguard would use KEMs, which also don't work for general purpose PKI.

What we really need is a signature based handshake and simple VPN solution (like what Wireguard does for the Noise Protocol Framework), that a stream multiplexing protocol can be layered on top of. QUIC gets the layers right, in the right order (first encrypt, then deal with transport features), but annoyingly none of the QUIC implementations make it easy to take one layer without the other.

[zoobab]

"Have all the bugs in OpenSSL over the years taught us nothing?"

TweetNaCL to the rescue.

[contact9879]

MASQUE[0] is the protocol for this. Cloudflare already uses masque instead of wireguard in their warp vpn.

[0]https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/

[khimaros]

i was curious about this and did some digging around for an open source implementation. this is what i found: https://github.com/iselt/masque-vpn

[dpeckett]

I've recently spent a bunch of time working on a mesh networking project that employs CONNECT-IP over QUIC [1].

There's a lot of benefits for sure, mTLS being a huge one (particularly when combined with ACME). For general purpose, spoke and hub VPN's tunneling over QUIC is a no-brainer. Trivial to combine with JWT bearer tokens etc. It's a neat solution that should be used more widely.

However there are downsides, and those downsides are primarily performance related. For a bunch of reasons, some just including poorly optimized library code, others involving relatively high message parsing/framing/coalescing/fragmenting costs, and userspace UDP overheads. On fat pipes today you'll struggle to get more than a few gbits of throughput @ 1500 MTU (which is plenty for internet browsing for sure).

For fat pipes and hardware/FPGA acceleration use cases, google probably has the most mature approach here with their datacenter transport PSP [2]. Basically a stripped down per flow IPsec. In-kernel IPsec has gotten a lot faster and more scalable in recent years with multicore/multiqueue support [3]. Internal benchmarking still shows IPsec on linux absolutely dominating performance benchmarks (throughput and latency).

For the mesh project we ended up pivoting to a custom offload friendly, kernel bypass (AF_XDP) dataplane inspired by IPsec/PSP/Geneve.

I'm available for hire btw, if you've got an interesting networking project and need a remote Go/Rust developer (contract/freelance) feel free to reach out!

1. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9484.html

2. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ann...

3. https://netdevconf.info/0x17/docs/netdev-0x17-paper54-talk-s...

[keepamovin]

Is quic related to the Chrome implemented WebTransport? Seems pretty cool to have that in browser API.

[AnthonyMouse]

The purpose of Wireguard is to be simple. The purpose of QUIC is to be compatible with legacy web junk. You don't use the second one unless you need the second one.

[geoctl]

QUIC isn't really about the web, it's more of a TCP+TLS replacement on top of UDP. You can build your own custom L7 on top of QUIC.

[johncolanduoni]

What legacy junk is QUIC compatible with? It doesn’t include anything HTTP-related at all. It’s just an encrypted transport layer.

[azalemeth]

Mullvad offers exactly the combination of wireguard in QUIC for obsfucation and to make traffic look like Https -- https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-quic-obfuscation-for...

[geoctl]

WireGuard-over-QUIC does not make any sense to me, this lowers performance and possibly the inner WireGuard MTUs. You can just replace WireGuard with QUIC altogether if you just want obfuscation.

[buildbuildbuild]

See also Obscura's approach of QUIC bridges to Mullvad as a privacy layer: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

[riobard]

The assumed mentality of “being flexible” is the very reason WireGuard was created to fight against in the first place, otherwise why bother? IPSec is already standardized and with wide-spread hardware implementation (both FPGA and ASIC) and flexible.

[wmf]

I think standards operate according to punctuated equilibrium so the market will only accept one new standard every ten years or so. I could imagine something like PQC causing a shift to QUIC in the future.

[HackerThemAll]

Why are you taking from people their will to experiment and design new stuff? Are they using your money or time? Is this just out of grumpiness, envy, condescension or what?

[smolder]

Quic is a corporate supported black hole. Corporations are anti-human. Its a wonder that there is still some freedom to make useful protocols on the internet and that people are nice enough to do that

[pastage]

Do you have examples of stable systems?

[philipallstar]

> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.

Ken Thompson wrote grep, and he is definitely recognised as such.