Researchers often face the lack of data on large operational networks to understand how they are used, how they behave, and sometimes how they fail. This data is crucial to drive the evolution of Internet protocols and develop techniques such as traffic engineering, DDoS detection and mitigation. Companies that have access to measurements from operational networks and services leverage this data to improve the availability, speed, and resilience of their Internet services. Unfortunately, the availability of large datasets, especially collected regularly over a long period of time, is a daunting task that remains scarce in the literature.

TCP and TLS are among the essential protocols in today's Internet. TCP ensures reliable data delivery while TLS secures the data transfer. Although they are very often used together, they have been designed independently following the Internet layered model. This paper demonstrates the various benefits that a closer integration between TCP and TLS would bring.

Application requirements evolve over time and the underlying protocols need to adapt. Most transport protocols evolve by negotiating protocol extensions during the handshake. Experience with TCP shows that this leads to delays of several years or more to widely deploy standardized extensions. In this paper, we revisit the extensibility paradigm of transport protocols.