short-paper

Does It Spin? On the Adoption and Use of QUIC's Spin Bit

Authors:

Constantin Sander,

Klaus WehrleAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 554 - 560

https://doi.org/10.1145/3618257.3624844

Published: 24 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Encrypted QUIC traffic complicates network management as traditional transport layer semantics can no longer be used for RTT or packet loss measurements. Addressing this challenge, QUIC includes an optional, carefully designed mechanism: the spin bit. While its capabilities have already been studied in test settings, its real-world usefulness and adoption are unknown. In this paper, we thus investigate the spin bit's deployment and utility on the web.

Analyzing our long-term measurements of more than 200 M domains, we find that the spin bit is enabled on ~10% of those with QUIC support and for ~50% / 60% of the underlying IPv4 / IPv6 hosts. The support is mainly driven by medium-sized cloud providers while most hyperscalers do not implement it. Assessing the utility of spin bit RTT measurements, the theoretical issue of reordering does not significantly manifest in our study and the spin bit provides accurate estimates for around 30.5% of connections using the mechanism, but drastically overestimates the RTT for another 51.7%. Overall, we conclude that the spin bit, even though an optional feature, indeed sees use in the wild and is able to provide reasonable RTT estimates for a solid share of QUIC connections, but requires solutions for making its measurements more robust.

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Cited By

Muthuraj NLu PVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Poster: How much of the Web Cares about QUIC's Anti-ossification Features?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689673(773-774)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689673
Kunze ISander CTissen LBode BWehrle K(2024)SpinTrap: Catching Speeding QUIC FlowsNOMS 2024-2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575719(1-10)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575719
Zirngibl JGebauer FSattler PSosnowski MCarle G(2024)QUIC Hunter: Finding QUIC Deployments and Identifying Server Libraries Across the InternetPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_13(273-290)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_13
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Does It Spin? On the Adoption and Use of QUIC's Spin Bit
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement
  2. Network services
    1. Network monitoring

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference

October 2023

746 pages

ISBN:9798400703829

DOI:10.1145/3618257

General Chairs:
Marie-José Montpetit
McGill University, Canada
,
Aris Leivadeas
École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Steve Uhlig
Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
,
Mobin Javed
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 24 October 2023

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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

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IMC '23

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SIGCOMM

IMC '23: ACM Internet Measurement Conference

October 24 - 26, 2023

Montreal QC, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Muthuraj NLu PVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Poster: How much of the Web Cares about QUIC's Anti-ossification Features?Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689673(773-774)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689673
Kunze ISander CTissen LBode BWehrle K(2024)SpinTrap: Catching Speeding QUIC FlowsNOMS 2024-2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575719(1-10)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575719
Zirngibl JGebauer FSattler PSosnowski MCarle G(2024)QUIC Hunter: Finding QUIC Deployments and Identifying Server Libraries Across the InternetPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_13(273-290)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_13
Sander CKunze IBlöcher LKosek MWehrle KMontpetit MLeivadeas AUhlig SJaved M(2023)ECN with QUIC: Challenges in the WildProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624821(540-553)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618257.3624821

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