SCONE Tools

This is a repository for some early testing tools to work with the in-development IETF Standard Communication with Network Elements (SCONE) protocol.

There are eBPF functions provided to:

1. Add SCONE packets into other QUIC packets that come into a network interface. This is only really intended for early testing, and not longer-term use after QUIC endpoint software supporting SCONE is more available.
2. Modify SCONE packets that come into a network interface, by changing the throughput guidance.
3. Remove SCONE packets that come into a network interface. This is to support early testing, prior to end-host QUIC stacks supporting SCONE.

Prerequisites

Assumptions:

• This runs on Linux. It was tested on Ubuntu 24.
• Root access is needed in order to create network namespaces and install eBPF modules.
• The test data flows use the hq application that comes from proxygen. Directions on building this are provided below.

Building the "hq" Application

    git clone https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float.git
    cd fast_float
    mkdir build && cd build
    cmake ..
    make
    sudo make install
    cd ..

    git clone https://github.com/facebook/proxygen.git
    cd proxygen/proxygen
    ./build.sh
    cp _build/proxygen/httpserver/hq .

Running Examples

There is a shell script included that:

• Creates a number of network namespaces and interconnects them.
• Installs eBPF code to add, modify, and remove SCONE packets on interfaces within the test network namespaces.
  • The code is only setup to work with SCONE on specific UDP ports, and other QUIC traffic or UDP traffic on other ports will not be impacted.
• Starts some transfers using 'hq' on different ports to generate QUIC traffic.
• Collects tcpdump PCAP captures at different points in the network.
  • You can observe 15 bytes packet size differences in UDP payloads at different points in the path, and see that the contents correspond to SCONE packets.
• Prints some counters that help to see what the SCONE eBPF code did.