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TLS 1.3 Is an Opportunity for Amazon, Google and Microsoft to End Censorship

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Re: TLS 1.3 Is an Opportunity for Amazon, Google and Microsoft to End Censorship

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're whitelisting names that point into arbitrary cloud stuff then you're screwed, the bad guys just get themselves co-located so that you'll happily connect to them because hey, this name was whitelisted and so the IP address must be OK. TLS SNI does NOT tell you where the client was trying to reach, you've made a classic security mistake of assuming bad guys are honest. Honest people will truthfully write good…

You are correct that if the bad guy co-locates at the same IP then it is a problem. However that then becomes an issue with the service that chose to host on a shared IP. For other services that use dedicated IPs but spin up/down machines based on load etc it is still much more useful and secure than running a proxy with a CA that generates fake certificates, especially when you can’t update the trust root of the cli…

The colocation would be trivial to fake. Just buy a second benign domain name, register it privately, and point a few A records at your servers.

You're back to seeing SNI requests for cdn12345.catpics.com which happens to be the same as command-and-control.suspicious-site.kp

Re: TLS 1.3 Is an Opportunity for Amazon, Google and Microsoft to End Censorship

#102
post #43
post #9

This article is unfortunately inaccurate. TLS1.3 does not include encrypted SNI. Encrypted SNI is still being worked on by the TLS working group, and isn't in a deployable state.

I believe this article is talking about domain fronting, not the use of encrypted SNI. With domain fronting, you connect to one service, say, amazon.com and put amazon.com in the SNI field. However, once you have a secure connection, you then tell Amazon that you really want to talk to some other website and Amazon routes the connection appropriately. To an outside observer, however, it just looks like you are talkin…

All the big sites have recently prevented domain fronting.

They are too scared of their main website being blocked at ISP's just because your small site uses their servers as a domain front.

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