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 👀

#privacy #mozilla #firefox @privacy

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.

Guillaume Rossolini
link
fedilink
5
edit-2
1Y

@rikudou @voxel
ASFAIR it used to be even worse than that, because if you didn’t want SNI (for compatibility reasons or whatever), but you still wanted a certificate, you had to have one server for every hostname (because each had its own IP), assuming you could afford the additional IP space

Granted you didn’t need a physical server, but that was still a bigger cost

Some servers are more flexible on that front, but early SNI didn’t have those

Rikudou_Sage
link
fedilink
31Y

Yeah, I thought I implied that, but that was the reason SNI started - IPv4 is a scarce resource and thus expensive and the only way to host multiple https websites was having multiple IPs (not necessarily multiple servers, you can easily have multiple IPs for one server, you just had to bind one IP per host), which was adding to the costs quite a bit and hobby projects couldn’t really afford it (well, they could, but not many people are spending hundreds of dollars for a hobby website).

@rikudou @voxel
Wasn’t SNI happening after the handshake? Or is this completely what ECH is about.

RIP Windows XP

Rikudou_Sage
link
fedilink
1
edit-2
1Y

It’s happening as part of the handshake. Probably not completely what it’s about, but it was the first that came to my mind.

Edit: It has to happen before the encryption is established, because otherwise the server doesn’t know which certificate to use, because it doesn’t know which host is the client requesting. There’s also ESNI (encrypted SNI) to solve this but I’m not sure on how many servers actually deploy it.

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.12K Posts
  • 78K Comments
  • Modlog