Re: [TLS] About encrypting SNI

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Yoav Nir <ynir.ietf@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The requirement for encrypted SNI is very simple. I want to browse certain
> web sites such that if people knew I was browsing them it might get me in
> trouble. We all like the example of a gay teenager in Uganda, but it could
> just as well be an American browsing a website advocating Shari’a law for
> all western countries landing in a no-flight list.
>
> Encrypting SNI would help if the “suspicious” web site is hosted by a
> hosting service, and there are multiple innocuous sites on the same IP
> address, and the traffic from the innocuous sites dominates the traffic to
> the server, and traffic for this site is not distinguishable by other means
> such as traffic analysis.  That’s a lot of ‘if’s up there, and if any of
> them fails, the adversary will know that I browsed the suspicious site.
> AFAIK Tor provides a far more robust protection of this kind of activity.
>

Let’s assume you are correct in all your assertions.  It is still the case
that every time you increase the proportion of the attack surface which is
encrypted, you increase the difficulty for snoopers. It is not a
requirement that you make the snoopers’ task impossible; in fact, all you
can ever do is crank up the difficulty for attackers. It seems obvious that
encrypting as much of connection setup as possible would increase attacker
difficulty so, if practical, it should be done.

>
> So I’m with Martin on this. If you need Tor, use Tor.
>
> Yoav
>
>
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