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  • QUIC working group looks to bring more security to Internet traffic

    Lucas Pardue serves as co-chair of the IETF QUIC Working Group, which focuses on a standards-track specification for a UDP-based, stream-multiplexing, encrypted transport protocol. The IETF blog recently asked Pardue about the QUIC standards project.

    • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
    14 Jun 2021

  • Q&A with our new Director of Development

    Lee-Berkeley Shaw joins the IETF Administration LLC today as Director of Development. She will focus on designing and delivering the strategy to achieve the IETF’s goals for financial sustainability, with a focus on growing the IETF Endowment. We asked her questions about her plans for the IETF and her background.

    • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
    7 Jun 2021

  • A new era in Internet transport

    The IETF’s Transport and Services (TSV) area is developing several potentially transformative technologies while it continues to maintain many of the foundational protocols of the Internet.

    • Martin DukeTransport Area Director
    • Zaheduzzaman SarkerTransport Area Director
    • Magnus Westerlund
    3 Jun 2021

  • Innovative New Technology for Sending Data Over the Internet Published as Open Standard

    Already broadly deployed and used, QUIC provides lower delay, improved security, and more robust delivery of data.

      3 Jun 2021

    • QUIC in the Internet industry

      QUIC, a new Internet transport technology that improves web application performance, security and privacy, was reviewed, redesigned and improved in the IETF, incorporating a broad range of input from across the industry.

        3 Jun 2021
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      HTTP/2 Approved

      • Mark NottinghamHTTPBIS Working Group Chair
      • Barry LeibaApplications Area Director

      18 Feb 2015

      After more than two years of discussion, over 200 design issues, 17 drafts, and 30 implementations, the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications have now been approved by the IETF’s steering group for publication as standards-track RFCs.

      The result is that HTTP/2 will help provide faster user experience for browsing, reduce the amount of bandwidth required, and make the use of secure connections easier.

      The HTTP Working Group began work on HTTP/2 in 2012 by selecting Google’s SPDY protocol as the starting point, holding a series of six interim meetings to incorporate community feedback. This resulted in substantial changes to the format of the protocol, its compression scheme, and its mapping to the semantics of HTTP.

      The resulting protocol is designed to allow a seamless switch between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, with minimal changes to applications and APIs, while at the same time offering improved performance and better use of network resources. Web users largely will be able to benefit from the improvements offered by HTTP/2 without having to do anything different.

      A key point in the protocol development process was the iteration the working group did between protocol updates, and implementations and testing. Certain draft protocol versions were labelled by the working group as “implementation drafts”, and the participants — many web browser and web server providers — updated their implementations and tested out the protocol changes. Most of the interim meetings included part of a day spent on hands-on interoperability testing and discussion. The result is a thoroughly validated protocol that has been shown to interoperate and that meets the needs of many major stakeholders.

      The HTTP/2 work specifically embodies the key IETF tenet about the value of “rough consensus and running code.”

      See the HTTP/2 home page, Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ), and the chair’s blog article for more information. The specifications themselves are available here for HTTP/2 and HPACK.

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