Android 18: you can only connect to approved wifi networks and visit approved websites.
…this is the way… /s
Sounds like a way to stop DNS adblockers.
You’re absolutely right: adblockers (even via pi-hole) will be ineffective.
Not mentioned in this article, but ECH lays the foundation for each application to decide if they trust the upstream DNS provider or not.
Normally, an app trusts all pre-installed CAs. If any of these CAs were to issue a fraudulent certificate, the app would be at risk from an on-path attacker. Some apps choose to limit the set of certificates they accept by either limiting the set of CAs they trust or by certificate pinning.
So using custom DNS to block/prevent unwanted updates and to block ads will be a thing of the past.
…but this does mean if your ISP or country is censoring the internet: their job has gotten much more difficult.
I disagree.
CA pinning has nothing to do with DNS.
CA pinning makes it harder to inspect the content of the connection e.g. via a Man-in-the-middle attack. But DNS-based blocking is not affected.
ECH has nothing to do with DNS.
DNS and DNS adblockers come before the ClientHello.
ECH is meant to make the wanted virtual host known without sending it as plaintext in the ClientHello.
Please refrain from commenting again.
If the article described it correctly this happens after DNS on the first connection to the target. So for users of PiHole etc. this won’t change anything but - unless their service supports this - they won’t benefit from it either.
Yeah, it’s the next step of https in essence, unrelated to dns. Browsers have had it for about 2 years now. Of course websites also need to support it to get any benefit.
DNS is already “solved” via DOH, which for adblocking purposes you can disable or point to your own dns server.ECH, this thing here, makes domain blocks impossible. Without it, advanced routers can use packet inspection to block connections to say example.org. With it, they would need to block IPs serving example.org, which would also block all other domains hosted frommthose IPs. Especially websites on big CDNs like cloudflare are essentially unblockable, you’d take down like 30% of the internet if you tried to block a single page on there.
Without ehc, traffic is indistinguishable between websites. With, it’s indistinguishable between servers.
