Encrypted Client Hello - the last puzzle piece to privacy
Sep 29, 2023Achiel van der Mandele, Alessandro Ghedini, Christopher Wood, Rushil Mehra
Summary
Introduced Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) as a successor to ESNI, making it available on all Cloudflare plans. ECH masks the Server Name Indication (SNI) during TLS handshakes by splitting the ClientHello message into an encrypted inner part containing the actual server name and an outer part with a shared SNI (cloudflare-ech.com). This prevents network intermediaries from snooping on visited websites, enhancing user privacy. Cloudflare is actively promoting ECH adoption and has enabled it for all free zones.
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