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Say (an encrypted) hello to a more private internet.
(blog.mozilla.org)
Does this mean your isp can't see the sites you visit anymore?
Sort of. They can still see which IP address you're connecting to, which by itself or in combination with some minor traffic analysis is quite often enough to identify which website you've visited. Perhaps it isn't if the website puts absolutely everything through a giant CDN like Cloudflare, but in that case it's Cloudflare which gets to see all the sites you visit which isn't a whole lot better than the status quo.
Still, it's a little less information given away at least some of the time. Better to do it than not do it.
in that case it’s Cloudflare which gets to see all the sites you visit
That's the status quo. CF holds the private keys to all reverse proxy'd sites hosted on it.
To be more precise, my belief is that the main thing ECH does is make it more difficult some of the time (depending on the details of how the site works) for observers of network traffic to directly see which website you've visited if it's one of those that have chosen to give all that data to Cloudflare or some similar system instead.
There also do still exist some simple web hosting setups that share many independent domain names on the same IP, but I think it's not as common as it probably was when they first came up with the idea of encrypting the tls server name many years ago. Maybe it'll make a comeback for sites whose users need to avoid censorship in this way if it's true that domain fronting has generally become more difficult.
Yes. Use a VPN. I recommend https://mullvad.net/en
Using a VPN just hands all of this information to them instead. That could be an improvement, but how do you know?
Well they can see your browsing history, sure. But HTTPS will stop them from seeing the content you actually see on the web. At this point we are just getting into discussions of layers of trust, which are generally impossible to solve if you don’t trust anyone. If you don’t trust anyone don’t use the internet, ever. I do trust mullvad. They’re explicit about who is involved, I have the name of every team member, and through peer review I consider them trustworthy.
For more info about how they are transparent, you can read their article about how they responded to a search warrant earlier this year:
In line with our policies such customer data did not exist. We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law. After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.
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Well, for half of the internet they are going to see AWS ELBs addresses.
Yes and no. If your isp is still providing unencrypted DNS for you, then they can still see the domain name you're visiting.
What if you force a dns, like say cloudflare?
Ordinary DNS requests are always plaintext and readable to anyone between you and the DNS server. So regardless of which DNS server you use, your ISP can see all your DNS lookups. For any amount of privacy for DNS, the minimum is something like DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS, the latter of which Firefox uses by default in some countries and supports everywhere.
I mean with this + DNS over HTTPS can we guarantee the isp can no longer see anything?
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Ordinary DNS requests are always plaintext and readable to anyone between you and the DNS server.
Not just readable... The ISP can inject their own responses too. Regular DNS is both unencrypted and unauthenticated, with most clients not enforcing DNSSEC.
so you're saying self host an authoritative DNS server
It's easy to setup something like AdGuard Home that provides malware blocking, ad blocking if you're interested in that, and supports DNS-over-HTTPS out of the box (unlike PiHole, which needs a bunch of manual setup)
That's how I understood it. With regular https your doing on those websites is already encrypted, but your ISP or whoever sits in between can still se which sites you're visiting. As far as I understand this standard would encrypt this step too.
Cool. Nice work Mozilla.
When is this coming to ff mobile?
Usually with these kind of engine-features, the rollout is simultaneous on desktop and Android.
And it says it's rolling out with version 118 here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/understand-encrypted-client-hello
Users using DNS-based filtering may need to tweak their configuration in order to make use of ECH. Firefox needs to be configured with a DNS-over-HTTPS server in order to make use of ECH. Depending on whether the DNS filter is locally hosted or hosted by an online provider, instructions for connecting to it over DoH will differ and users of these services will need to check their accompanying documentation.
Sooo, I'm a bit lost here. How do I ensure everything's working when I'm using a pihole? I don't think I'm understanding everything correctly
I think it requires you shut your pihole. Um. sorry. Ill let myself out.
It sounds like you'll have to set your Pihole as the DNS server in Firefox's settings, and then maybe from there it'll work itself out? Or maybe the Pihole documentation will be updated in the next few days with some instructions on enabling this. I'm unsure myself to be honest.
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So with this the ISP, or someone else sitting in the middle, would not even know the URL you're accessing?
I don't think so, that'd be straight up impossible unless you're behind a VPN. Your ISP can see every connection made between you and any other server, but a VPN uses encrypted payloads between their servers and you, and they make the requests using their servers, and pass the results to you. That way, your ISP only sees that you're using a VPN, but can't see anything else.
As far as I understand it, ECH uses DoH (DNS Over HTTPS) to encrypt the domain name of your connections, but a direct IP address is always required, and most of the times, it's enough to determine the website, as the ISPs can locate just about anything easily. However, the ISP won't be able to (easily) know anything else about the connection, which remains unbroken between you and the server you're connecting with.
But still a very good feature nonetheless.
IPs of websites are fine to expose in this day and age, in my opinion and threat model.
Most sites being hosted in the cloud, with rotating IPs give you obscurity there.
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In my opinion, Firefox should give an option to enable ECH forcefully for users like me who has AdGuardHome/Pi-Hole running on Home Network. Currently, if DOH is disabled in Firefox setting, ECH won't work, as per Firefox. 😦
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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