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Benderyesterday at 8:46 PM1 replyview on HN

FWIW Nginx 1.30 [1] just released and supports it so most distributions will have support as soon as those responsible for builds and testing builds push it forward.

"Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP)."

"Nginx 1.30 also adds HTTP/2 to backend and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), sticky sessions support for upstreams, and the default proxy HTTP version being set to HTTP/1.1 with Keep-Alive enabled."

But, in a personal/single website server, ech does not really add privacy, adversaries can still observe the IP metadata and compare what's hosted there

I don't quite follow. I have dozens of throw-away silly hobby domains. I can use any of them as the outer-SNI. How is someone observing the traffic going to know the inner-SNI domain unless someone builds a massive database of all known inner+outer combinations which can be changed on a whim? ECH requires DOH so unless the ISP has tricked the user into using their DOH end-point they can't see the HTTPS resource record.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770007


Replies

ameliaquiningyesterday at 10:00 PM

It's not that adversaries can directly see the domain name; this doesn't have anything to do with domain fronting. The issue is that ECH doesn't hide the server's IP address, so it's mostly useless for privacy if that IP address uniquely identifies that server. The situation where it helps is if the server shares that IP address with lots of other people, i.e., if it's behind a big cloud CDN that supports ECH (AFAIK that's currently just Cloudflare). But if that's the case, it doesn't matter whether Nginx or whatever other web server you run supports ECH, because your users' TLS negotiations aren't with that server, they're with Cloudflare.

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