Quick UDP Internet Connections and Transmission Control Protocol in unsafe networks: A comparative analysis

Secure data transmission and efficient network performance are both key aspects of the modern Internet. Traditionally, Transport Layer Security (TLS)/Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been used for reliable and secure networking communications. In the past decade, Quick User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Internet Connections QUIC has been designed and implemented on UDP, attempting to improve security and efficiency of Internet traffic. Real‐world platform investigations are carried out in this paper to evaluate TLS/TCP and QUIC/UDP in maintaining communication, security and efficiency under three different types of popular cyber‐attacks. A set of interesting findings, including delay, loss, server CPU utilisation and server memory usage are presented to provide a comprehensive understanding of the two protocol stacks in performing malicious traffic. More specifically, in terms of the efficiency in achieving short delays and low packet loss rates with limited CPU and memory resources, QUIC/UDP performs better under Denial of Service attacks but TLS/TCP overtakes QUIC/UDP when handling MitM attacks. In terms of security, the implementation of TCP tends to be more secure than QUIC, but QUIC traffic patterns are harder to learn using machine learning methods. We hope that these insights will be informative in protocol selection for future networks and applications, as well as shedding light on the further development of the two protocol stacks.