Is it true that only the website name is visible to ISPs?
Is it true that only the website name is visible to ISPs?
I've heard this is true for https, but I'm unsure.
The technical reason why is because when visiting a website, the web browser has to translate the website name (aka domain name) into a number it can use to connect to; this is akin to looking up a person in your phone contacts and the phone calling the number. This is the part the ISP sees.
The actual web request would be invisible over HTTPS because as far as the ISP sees, it is a random collection of letters, numbers, and symbols (ie encryption). Only you and the web server know how to decode the information.
The web server sees a request for
https://www.example.com/foo/bar?baz=bamas the following:GET /foo/bar?baz=bam HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.comHTH
thanks :)
Yes, https hides most things but leaks the sni (server name indicator. We came up with a solution called esni (encrypted sni), but that also had issues. It didn't have much adoption before esni got replaced with ech (encrypted hello). Cloudflare actually has a neat website to check if your browser is supporting ech.
You can learn more about it here, it's pretty cool! https://blog.cloudflare.com/handshake-encryption-endgame-an-ech-update/
Yeah, but DoH is blocked in China and Firefox doesn't enable them separately
It seems like I should be able to use ECH and dnscrypt together, for example
Basically, yes. It can see subdomains and domains, but the content including folders, files and query data is all encrypted in transit.