SECURITY CLASSIFICATION BASED QUIC TRAFFIC STEERING IN A SECURE INTERNET GATEWAY (SIG)

The Quick User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol is slated to become the next (third) major version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – i.e., HTTP/3. As applications transition to QUIC for web traffic, a Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) needs to effectively load balance, proxy, and classify QUIC traffic. Techniques are presented herein that make use of a custom Connection ID (CID) artifact to allow a load balancer to determine, with minimal processing, a target server, and potentially the application that the QUIC flow is serving, in support of steering traffic to the appropriate upstream services. Additionally, techniques are presented herein that leverage an exchange of data over an out-of-band channel in support of the enforcement of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements on an enterprise gateway