Weirdly enough I think QUIC often does something that is not much better because of address validation. It is not safe for the QUIC server to send a bunch of la

Weirdly enough I think QUIC often does something that is not much better because of address validation. It is not safe for the QUIC server to send a bunch of large packets back to the client source address without being confident the client controls the address. We run QUIC in production so I’ll grab an example conversation to show how many round trips connection setup takes. I guess we might not be optimising connection setup correctly because we are using long running QUIC connections to transport our own protocol and I don’t care how long the connection setup takes. so we are using a slightly older version of QUIC than the RFC and using go-quic on server and client. and this is what i see when creating a connection: Client: Initial (1284 bytes) includes client hello Server: Retry (166 bytes) includes retry token Client: Initial (1284 bytes) including retry token and client hello Server: Server Hello/Encrypted Extensions/Cert Request/Certificate/Certificate Verify/Finished (1284 bytes) Client: Certificate/Certificate Verify/Finished (1284 bytes) address validation is covered in RFC 9000: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9000#section-8.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9000#section-8.1 probably what go-quic does is not optimal because you don't always have to validate the address. Prior to validating the client address, servers MUST NOT send more than three times as many bytes as the number of bytes they have received. This limits the magnitude of any amplification attack that can be mounted using spoofed source addresses. For the purposes of avoiding amplification prior to address validation, servers MUST count all of the payload bytes received in datagrams that are uniquely attributed to a single connection. This includes datagrams that contain packets that are successfully processed and datagrams that contain packets that are all discarded. ... A server might wish to validate the client address before starting the cryptographic handshake. QUIC uses a token in the Initial packet to provide address validation prior to completing the handshake. This token is delivered to the client during connection establishment with a Retry packet (see Section 8.1.2) or in a previous connection using the NEW_TOKEN frame (see Section 8.1.3).