Re: New Plaintext QUIC-LB Design

[Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen <[e-mail]>]

I would be hesitant to introduce a situation where a load balancer is forced to use memory, especially memory it doesn’t fully control. It may be fine as a choice, but not the only choice.

Aside from potential attacks, there is also the hardware cost/complexity. SHA256 and AES is pretty standard in almost anything, but lots of RAM is a cost driver.

It is really hard to estimate crypto vs lookup overhead, but it is far from a given that lookup will be faster once the tables grow large.

Less coordination is a good thing though. I’m afraid that without out of band payload to coordinate, there will have to be a choice between configuration and state.

Mikkel

> On 15 Jan 2021, at 21.04, Martin Duke <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> To muddy this discussion a little further, after a little more thinking I believe there's a way to generalize this approach to all three of the original algorithms, encrypted or unencrypted, so there is never a need to manually allocate server IDs.
> 
> Again, the main tradeoff here is simpler configuration vs. more complexity and state at the load balancer.
> 
> As a document organization matter, rather than have six different algorithms I would prefer to specify three with a separate section describing the two separate ways to allocate a server ID.
> 
> But it is not too late to yell "stop" at this multiplicity of options if people feel the tradeoffs are clear-cut in one way or the other.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 6:50 PM Martin Duke <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> Yes. Do you have an alternate suggestion?
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 5:54 PM Christian Huitema <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/11/2021 5:22 PM, Martin Duke wrote:
>> Perhaps I should make some edits for clarity!
>> 
>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 16:52 Christian Huitema <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> I am looking at the text of section 4.2, and I am not sure how I would implement that. What should be the value of the config rotation bits in CID created by the server?
>> 
>> Any config includes the corresponding CR bits, and when generating the CID it would use those bits.
>> 
>> The confusing part is that, for this algorithm, a usable SID has to be extracted from any CID, hence all the weird stuff about CIDs with undefined configs.
>> 
>> Aside from that, it's like PCID: any server-generated CID uses the CR bits in the config, optional length encoding, SID, server-use octets.
>> 
>> 
>> Should the 6 other bits in the first octet be set to a CID Len or to a random value?
>> 
>> It depends on the rest of the config, as with the other algorithms.
>> 
>> Issss the timer set when the server ID is first added to the table, or is the timer reset each time a packet is received with that CID? In the latter case, is it reset when any packet is received, or only when a "first initial" packet is received?
>> 
>> When any packet is received with that SID (not CID), the expiration is refreshed.
> OK. So we can have the following:
> 
> 1) Server learns of Server-ID = X.
> 
> 2) Server creates new CID with that server ID, uses it to complete handshake.
> 
> 3) Client maintains a long running connection with that CID.
> 
> 4) Server keeps receiving messages with CID pointing to server-ID = X
> 
> 5) server-ID=X never expires.
> 
> Is that by design?
> 
> -- Christian Huitema
> 
> 
>