Encrypted Client Hello: Because Privacy Wankers Weren’t Done Making My Life Hell Yet

Oh look, another TLS extension designed by idealistic hippies who’ve never had to support a real network in their pathetic lives. Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is the latest privacy circle-jerk determined to turn my troubleshooting sessions into a special kind of digital hell where packets go to die.

Here’s the shitshow in a nutshell: ECH encrypts the entire Client Hello message so that nosey bastards—like your micromanaging boss, your throttling ISP, or that three-letter agency nobody admits exists—can’t see which godforsaken website you’re trying to reach. Gone is the Server Name Indication (SNI) sitting there in plaintext like a flashing neon sign, replaced with encrypted gibberish that makes traffic inspection about as useful as a chocolate teapot in a sauna.

“But isn’t privacy important?” whines the end user while I try to figure out why their connection to CryptoScam.net keeps dropping. Fuck privacy when I’m attempting to diagnose routing issues! Now every middlebox, corporate firewall, and intrusion detection system between here and Timbuktu shits itself because it can’t read the SNI anymore. My carefully crafted filtering rules? Toast. My ability to see which malware domain you’re phoning home to? Gone, like my will to live on a Monday morning.

Firefox supports ECH because Mozilla hates network administrators personally and wants us to suffer. Chrome? Dragging their feet, probably because Google can’t effectively monetize what they can’t read and correlate. You also need DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) for this abortion to work properly, which means trusting Cloudflare—those monopolistic bastards who want to own every packet on the fucking internet—to handle your DNS. What could possibly go wrong with centralizing the entire web’s infrastructure through one company?

Is it ready for prime time? Fuck no. The ecosystem is fractured as a dropped iPhone, enterprise security gear is having existential crises, and half the internet still thinks unencrypted SNI is cutting-edge technology from the future. But sure, let’s roll out another encryption layer that breaks everything that came before it and makes legitimate traffic look identical to botnet command-and-control connections. Because what sysadmins really needed was more invisible, uninspectable traffic clogging up the pipes.

Source: https://isc.sans.edu/diary/rss/32778

Anecdote: Just last week some luser opened a ticket crowing about how ECH was “keeping their browsing private” from the corporate network. So I null-routed every ECH-enabled endpoint and told them the protocol must be “experiencing technical difficulties.” When they complained to management, I showed the boss how ECH prevents us from filtering malicious sites. Now the user has to fill out a paper form in triplicate—handwritten with a fountain pen—requesting firewall exceptions for every single domain they want to visit. Privacy comes at a price, and that price is my petty vengeance.

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