Re: [TLS] Final nail in the coffin for cleartext SNI/ALPN in TLS 1.3

[Juho Vähä-Herttua <[e-mail]>]

> On 12.11.2013, at 2.55, [e-mail] (Martin Rex) wrote:
> 
> To me, this is self-illusion.  Why should NSA look at SNI at all?

At this point I must point out that not everything is about NSA. There are certain countries that block DNS to the open internet and therefore all DNS queries are performed inside national borders. Some of these countries have also managed to block Tor with rather complicated active probing and IP blocks.

I can confirm that a working solution to easily get to services like google/facebook without full VPN is to edit /etc/hosts to point to some unblocked IP e.g. in Europe and use HTTPS. What makes me sad is the knowledge that SNI is leaking the hostname and makes those connections trivial to block, even though I haven't come across SNI based blocking yet.

I haven't put enough thought into this to say if encrypting SNI is technically feasible or adds too much complication. But I would like to hear how come in the situation I have just described (and have personally experienced) leaking SNI is not a problem? AFAIK these countries only do passive surveillance, because active surveillance would be too expensive and slow down connections too much.


Juho