Qt Contributors Summit 2019 - Qt 6 Network Overview

Qt Network team’s plan of work for Qt 6

• https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-75638 is the parent item to track

Clean up in QSsl

• Get rid of a stale OpenSSL backend - only 1.1 and following will be supported
• Completely remove all the code related to (previously deprecated in 5.13) SSL v2 and SSL v3

New TLS backend

• A new TLS back-end was contributed recently, using mbedTLS. We will get it in Qt 6 most probably, but requires quite some work (not in a „ready“ shape yet)

New possible features and improvements in QSsl

• We want to avoid temporary buffers, especially in OpenSSL case (would require something similar to what QDtlsOpenssl does)
• Trying to make handshake less rough, allowing the underlying TLS library to send proper alert messages (WIP for OpenSSL, more research needed for other backends)
• New API needed to enable work with session tickets on a server side (somehow provide access to STEK?)

A better design for QSslSocket

• It's QTcpSocket, which also has 'plainSocket' (which is QTcpSocket itself), would be nice to make things more straight.
• Could be similar to QDtls, which is not QUdpSocket at all, but works with QUdpSocket. A lot of work/changes, probably, not Qt 6.

QNetworkAccessmanager

• Change default redirect policies (work in progress)
• Enable HSTS by default

Removing bearer management

• There has been complaints about it (crashes, high CPU load - depends on a platform)
• Radio interfaces as bearer are not best option
• Bearer management is a legacy from S60

So the proposal:

• Remove bearer management
• Add requested features afterwards
• WIP: Connection Monitoring, done (?) for Darwin and Windows.