Louis Navarre
Louis Navarre has been a researcher at INL since September 2016 and is currently in his final year of PhD. His research focuses on the transport layer, especially the QUIC protocol and multicasting to improve the scalability of Internet communication.
His main work under the supervision of Prof. Olivier Bonaventure consists of extending QUIC and Multipath QUIC to support multicast at the transport layer. The extension, Flexicast QUIC, enables applications to efficiently deliver data using an underlying multicast network and per-receiver unicast paths to handle acknowledgments, retransmissions, and fallback when multicast fails or is unavailable. The paper was published in the ACM SIGCOMM CCR in April 2025. Louis placed second in the Student Research Competition at SIGCOMM 2025 for its initial deployment of Flexicast QUIC on the Internet with Automatic Multicast Tunneling.
On the side, Louis investigated the Optimistic Acknowledgment Attack in QUIC, showing that despite its mention and the design of a protection mechanism in QUIC’s specification, most existing open-source QUIC stacks did not support it and were vulnerable to the attack. This work was published in ANRW 2024 and led to several fixes in major implementations, including xQUIC, quiche, and msquic. Cloudflare published a blog post about it.
Louis also worked on Forward Erasure Correction at the network layer to provide transparent, high-speed protection for upper-layer protocols. This work was published in ICNP in 2024.