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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Something that puzzles me about ECH:

> In verifying the client-facing server certificate, the client MUST interpret the public name as a DNS-based reference identity [RFC9525]. Clients that incorporate DNS names and IP addresses into the same syntax (e.g. Section 7.4 of [RFC3986] and [WHATWG-IPV4]) MUST reject names that would be interpreted as IPv4 addresses.

Aside from apparently not considering the existence of IPv6, why are IP-based certificates explicitly ruled out? This makes the spec entirely meaningless for small servers and basically requires shifting hosting to shared hosts/massive CDNs to provide any protection against SNI snooping.

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I think it's saying that you can't make the name look like an IP address; i.e. if the syntax were www.google.com[142.250.117.139] (I'm making this syntax up) you couldn't put 142.250.117.139[142.250.117.139].

The syntax being referred to includes some obscure, outdated addressing formats (IPv4 addresses represented as two or three number groups in dotted notation rather than the normal 4).

However, "DNS-based reference identity [RFC9525]" seems to explicitly disallow IP-based certificates by requiring a DNS name. I can only interpret the sentence I quoted as written to say "make sure you never ever accidentally validate an IP address".

I don't think your interpretation is right. If it were,

> Clients that incorporate DNS names and IP addresses into the same syntax

They wouldn't mention the IP addresses at all. Also, notice the word "and".

\> This makes the spec entirely meaningless for small servers and basically requires shifting hosting to shared hosts/massive CDNs to provide any protection against SNI snooping.

Actually you can setup ECH on your server, and configure the public_name to be something like `cloudflare-ech.com` , so clients would indeed use that in the OuterSNI, connect to you, without you needing to use CF. And middleboxes might think they are indeed connecting to CF (though CF publishes their IP ranges so this could be checked elsewhere).

IPv6 addresses aren't confusable with a DNS name in these syntaxes AFAIU so it's not that they didn't consider IPv6 but that it's not relevant to the issue.

Yes, "Don't stand out" technologies like ECH aren't useful if you inherently stand out anyway. They're intended to make broad surveillance and similar undirected attacks less effective, they aren't magic invisibility cloaks and won't protect you if you're a singular target.

The colon isn’t a valid character in DNS, so there’s just no risk of confusing IPv6 addresses (which contain at least one colon in all notations I’ve seen).

For IPv4, there’s room for ambiguity.

And how are IP certificates required for small servers?

> For IPv4, there’s room for ambiguity.

I can't think of a single numeric TLD, so I don't think anyone is confusing IP literals with domain names, unless they're doing so extremely lazily.

> And how are IP certificates required for small servers?

You need a valid certificate as the outer certificate which contains an SNI that will still be readable. For cloudflare.com and google.com that's easy; you can't tell what website Cloudflare is proxying and whether Google is serving you Youtube, Gmail, or Google Search content.

For an independently-hosted myhumanrightsblog.net, that's not as easy. They'd need another domain reachable on that server to set up the ECH connection to hide the risky TLD. Clients being snooped on still get specific domains logged.

IP certificates work around that issue by validating the security of the underlying connection rather than any specific hostname. Any server could be serving any hostname over an IP-address-validated connection. For snooped-on clients, the IP address is already part of the network traffic anyway, but no domains ever hit the traffic logs at all.

But then your underlying issue is that you're microhosting and can't hide behind a large cloud provider's domain front, so isn't that inherent to anything you might do?

In other words, blocking solutions that know your small blog is hosted exclusively on 1.2.3.4, without any collateral damage to other blogs the blocking government cares about will just block your IP.

Conversely, if you're hosting importedgoodsecommercesitegovernmentofficialslove.com next to myhumanrightsblog.net on the same IP, ECH is for you and solves your problem: Just register mycoolagnostichosting.net and do ECH to that.

"Just buy a second domain exclusively to work around the arbitrary restrictions put onto the protocol" works as a solution, but it's a silly solution that shouldn't be necessary.

ECH doesn't benefit you if you're connecting directly to one IP. Middleboxes can track that you're connecting to this IP.

ECH prevents tracking through routing layers where your ClientHello might contain foo.example.com or bar.example.com but route via the same IP (Cloudflare). A middlebox can see you are using a cloudflare hosted website, but not know what cloudflare website.

There's no benefit encrypting the SNI with 10.20.30.40 if they can see you're connecting to 10 20.30.40 anyway

THe benefit is that the SNI is not being logged. Resolving an IP to a domain name is pretty hard for a small actor who doesn't have a record of all DNS records.

That's a good point. I was thinking more of a "block this list of wrongthink TLDs" use case, but "list all hostnames accessed by person x" is of course also worth considering.

Probably why TLD requires the first character to be an alpha character. com3 is okay, but 3com is not. Unless it's to protect spec against ignoring that requirement I don't see where confusing could surface.

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