Frando / quinn-wasm

quinn-wasm-web

Status: Experimental

This demo runs the quinn QUIC implementation compiled to WASM in the browser. It forwards UDP packets over a WebSocket connection to a relay server, which then sends them out to the actual destination. All packets are end-to-end encrpyted between browser and the destination QUIC server; the relay cannot read anything.

Caveats:

• The demo uses self-signed certificates without any checks, so it could be MITM'ed. This can be mitigated though by either shipping regular WebPKI certificates in the WASM bundle, or using P2P certificates, e.g. like Iroh Net
• This currently needs a few patches to quinn and rustls. See the GitHub repo for details.
• You likely do not want to run this as-is in production, because it will allow anyone to use your relay server to send any kind of UDP packet to any destination.

Demotime!

A public demo runs here currently.

Run the demo

Build the WASM library:

cd examples/web
wasm-pack build --target web --debug

Run the relay server:

cd examples/relay
cargo run

Run a QUIC server to connect to:

cd examples/quic-echo-server
cargo run

Then open http://localhost:3000 in a web browser. Clicking the START button will open a websocket connection to the relay server, create an in-browser QUIC endpoint, and let the relay server forward the QUIC UDP packets to the destinaation server.

Patches needed

• The wasm32-unknown-unknown target does not implement std::time::Instant and std::time::SystemTime. Therefore, any code that uses these will panic in the browser. There are implementations for these primitives that use the web platform, however there is no way currently to swap the panicking std impls for another impl. The only way is to use feature flags in all dependencies.
• The quinn crate always wants to compile socket2, even if the native UDP backend is not used.

These are the branches in use at the demo. If this endavour is deemed worthwhile, I will start to create PRs out of these branches.

• quinn: Frando/quinn#feat-wasm-web
  • Put the native UDP implementation in quinn-udp behind a on-by-default feature flag
  • Swap std::time to web_time if the wasm-web feature is enabled
• rustls-pki-types: Frando/rustls-pki-types#wasm-web
  • Use web_time in place of std::time when compiling to WASM for the browser (through an optional feature flag wasm-web).
• rustls: Frando/rustls#0.21-wasm
  • swaps std::time to web_time. Will not be needed on 0.22 because there all usages are changed to rustls_pki_types::UnixTime (which will need a feature flag, see below).