ngtcp2

"Call it TCP/2. One More Time."

ngtcp2 project is an effort to implement QUIC protocol which is now being discussed in IETF QUICWG for its standardization.

Branching strategy

As of the beginning of draft-23 development, the new branching strategy has been introduced. The master branch tracks the latest QUIC draft development. When new draft-NN is published, the new branch named draft-NN-1 is created based on the master branch. Those draft-NN branches are considered as "archived", which means that no update is expected. PR should be made to the master branch only.

For older draft implementations:

Documentation

Online documentation is available.

Requirements

The libngtcp2 C library itself does not depend on any external libraries. The example client, and server are written in C++17, and should compile with the modern C++ compilers (e.g., clang >= 8.0, or gcc >= 8.0).

The following packages are required to configure the build system:

pkg-config >= 0.20
autoconf
automake
autotools-dev
libtool

libngtcp2 uses cunit for its unit test frame work:

cunit >= 2.1

To build sources under the examples directory, libev and nghttp3 are required:

libev
nghttp3 (https://github.com/ngtcp2/nghttp3) for HTTP/3

The client and server under examples directory require patched OpenSSL as crypto backend:

Patched OpenSSL (https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/openssl/tree/OpenSSL_1_1_1g-quic-draft-33)

Build from git

$ git clone --depth 1 -b OpenSSL_1_1_1g-quic-draft-33 https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/openssl
$ cd openssl
$ # For Linux
$ ./config enable-tls1_3 --prefix=$PWD/build
$ make -j$(nproc)
$ make install_sw
$ cd ..
$ git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/nghttp3
$ cd nghttp3
$ autoreconf -i
$ ./configure --prefix=$PWD/build --enable-lib-only
$ make -j$(nproc) check
$ make install
$ cd ..
$ git clone https://github.com/ngtcp2/ngtcp2
$ cd ngtcp2
$ autoreconf -i
$ # For Mac users who have installed libev with MacPorts, append
$ # ',-L/opt/local/lib' to LDFLAGS, and also pass
$ # CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include" to ./configure.
$ ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PWD/../openssl/build/lib/pkgconfig:$PWD/../nghttp3/build/lib/pkgconfig LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,$PWD/../openssl/build/lib"
$ make -j$(nproc) check

Client/Server

After successful build, the client and server executable should be found under examples directory. They talk HTTP/3.

Client

$ examples/client [OPTIONS] <HOST> <PORT> [<URI>...]

The notable options are:

-d, --data=<PATH>: Read data from <PATH> and send it to a peer.

Server

$ examples/server [OPTIONS] <ADDR> <PORT> <PRIVATE_KEY_FILE> <CERTIFICATE_FILE>

The notable options are:

-V, --validate-addr: Enforce stateless address validation.

H09client/H09server

There are h09client and h09server which speak HTTP/0.9. They are written just for quic-interop-runner. They share the basic functionalities with HTTP/3 client and server but have less functions (e.g., h09client does not have a capability to send request body, and h09server does not understand numeric request path, like /1000).

Resumption and 0-RTT

In order to resume a session, a session ticket, and a transport parameters must be fetched from server. First, run examples/client with --session-file, and --tp-file options which specify a path to session ticket, and transport parameter files respectively to save them locally.

Once these files are available, run examples/client with the same arguments again. You will see that session is resumed in your log if resumption succeeds. Resuming session makes server's first Handshake packet pretty small because it does not send its certificates.

To send 0-RTT data, after making sure that resumption works, use -d option to specify a file which contains data to send.

Token (Not comes in Retry packet)

QUIC server might send a token to client after connection has been established. Client can send this token in subsequent connection to the server. Server verifies the token and if it succeeds, the address validation completes and lifts some restrictions on server which might speed up transfer. In order to save and/or load a token, use --token-file option of examples/client. The given file is overwritten if it already exists when storing a token.

Crypto helper library

In order to make TLS stack integration less painful, we provide a crypto helper library which offers the basic crypto operations.

The header file exists under crypto/includes/ngtcp2 directory.

Each library file is built for a particular TLS backend. The available crypto helper libraries are:

libngtcp2_crypto_openssl: Use OpenSSL as TLS backend
libngtcp2_crypto_gnutls: Use GnuTLS as TLS backend

Configuring Wireshark for QUIC

Wireshark can be configured to analyze QUIC traffic using the following steps:

Set SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable:

$ export SSLKEYLOGFILE=quic_keylog_file

Set the port that QUIC uses

Go to Preferences->Protocols->QUIC and set the port the program listens to. In the case of the example application this would be the port specified on the command line.
Set Pre-Master-Secret logfile

Go to Preferences->Protocols->TLS add set the Pre-Master-Secret log file to the same value that was specified for SSLKEYLOGFILE.
Choose the correct network interface for capturing

Make sure you choose the correct network interface for capturing. For example, if using localhost choose the loopback network interface on macos.
Create a filter

Create A filter for the udp.port and set the port to the port the application is listening to. For example:
```
udp.port == 7777
```

License

The MIT License

Akheon23 / ngtcp2