Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
QUIC is a new Internet secure transport protocol currently in the process of IETF standardization. It is intended as a replacement for the TLS/TCP stack and will be the basis of HTTP/3, the next official version of the hypertext transfer protocol. As a result, it is likely, in the near future, to carry a substantial fraction of traffic on the Internet. We describe our experience applying a methodology of compositional specification-based testing to QUIC. We develop a formal specification of the wire protocol, and use this specification to generate automated randomized testers for implementations of QUIC. The testers effectively take one role of the QUIC protocol, interacting with the other role to generate full protocol executions, and verifying that the implementations conform to the formal specification. This form of testing generates significantly more diverse stimuli and stronger correctness criteria than interoperability testing, the primary method used to date to validate QUIC and its implementations. As a result, numerous implementation errors have been found. These include some vulnerabilities at the protocol and implementation levels, such as an off-path denial of service scenario and an information leak similar to the "heartbleed" vulnerability in OpenSSL.
McMillan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.