Say (an encrypted) hello to a more private internet.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/encrypted-hello/
Nothing big, but kinda interesting. I’m excited to see how this will go 👀
It is kinda big, previously you had to send the host unencrypted to support SNI which in turn was needed to support https for multiple sites per one IP address, which was needed because we lack IP addresses. So there were basically two options: compromise privacy a tiny bit (by sending host unencrypted), or make it impossible for most websites to have any privacy at all (by making it impossible to have a https certificate).
Now you can have the best of both worlds. Granted, you need to have DoH (which still isn’t the default on most systems AFAIK), but it’s still a step in the right direction.
I don’t get it… How does this protect anything? If we want our packets to reach a web server, we need to write the server’s IP address on them. If a snooper has the IP, can’t they just lookup the domain name from a DNS server? Or is that not a service DNS provides?
If the IP address is encrypted, how will the routers know where to send the packets? Only solution I can think of would be onion routing… Am I wrong??
An IP address is no longer associated with just one website/domain name. There could be thousands of websites running on a single IP address.
As is, anyone can currently look at your encrypted traffic and see in plain text which site you’re surfing to. So this proposal is long overdue.
A government will still subpoena the destination IP for the information if they want it.
ECH protects against warrantless monitoring and other non-government bad actors and I’m happy to see it implemented. If there hasn’t been a strong enough privacy argument to use Firefox for someone to date, this is a big one.
A government will still subpoena the destination IP for the information if they want it.
Sure, but they probably won’t do that every day, so for the general public this is an improvement.
And also they cant get the info if the logs are deleted
They can’t get info that has been deleted yes, but I think it might be possible to coerce the company into starting to collect logs, legally or not.
somebody wiresharking your traffic can see the domain name you’re contacting even if you use https; this solves that.
reverse DNS lookup does exist, but it’s not always accurate, especially when multiple websites are hosted on the same server (which is more common than you think)
You need to read how SNI works, then it will make sense
While this is good for survielience circumventing… It is looking like the beginning of the end of DNS filtering and the popularization of encrypted telemetry.
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So if I understand it correctly, with this scheme the traffic between my computer and the DNS server is encrypted and so my internet provider won’t know which websites I’m visiting?
DNS of HTTPS or TLS has been available for years, but it hasn’t been adopted widely because the hello at the beginning if the three way handshake when connecting to a website ratted you out to your ISP anyways.
