Explore a groundbreaking conference talk on Sidekick protocols, an innovative approach to in-network assistance for opaque transport protocols. Delve into the challenges of protocol ossification and privacy in post-TCP transport protocols like QUIC and Web-RTC. Discover how Sidekick allows in-network intermediaries to assist endpoints without compromising the opacity and integrity of the underlying connection. Learn about the novel mathematical tool called quACK, which enables selective acknowledgment of opaque packets without access to cleartext sequence numbers. Examine real-world and emulation-based evaluations demonstrating Sidekick's performance improvements in scenarios such as early retransmission over lossy Wi-Fi paths, proxy acknowledgments for energy savings, and the path-aware congestion-control mechanism PACUBIC. Gain insights into this Outstanding Paper Award and Community Award-winning research presented at NSDI '24 by researchers from Stanford University and the University of Oslo. Read more