Thanks for the explanation!

________________________________
From: Nick Sullivan <[email protected]>

...

> A concrete example might help. Suppose "Proxywerks" is a large 
> fronting/CDN-style deployment serving millions of domains from one shared ECH 
> pool. All of those domains use the same ECHConfig with 
> public_name="proxywerks-ech.com<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://proxywerks-ech.com__;!!Bt8RZUm9aw!68eUhVj7opCd-QMf1oGbKSe4IpGGOaE4OD2Vvxm6CGso-GdV7doBIhzzPWvBYPVf8PFRXUV4BSwnSu8EXU_xNNs$>".
>  The actual serving footprint is a large and changing set of shared edge 
> addresses across multiple Proxywerks ASNs plus some BYOIP space, borrowed 
> regional ISP IPs,

Thanks, this helps to clarify the use case.

In this example, the Proxywerks ASN and BYOIP spaces are slow to change and 
trivial to enumerate, so I don't think they contribute much to the value of 
this proposition.  If we imagine that Proxywerks also has dynamic arrangements 
in which IP addresses are borrowed from many different ISPs, that could make 
enumeration more challenging and potentially justify this proposal.  However, 
in my experience:

* These kinds of borrowed IPs are usually limited to use in a particular 
region, and are not available in the regions under threat.
* These IP addresses are slow to change.
* These IP addresses are easy to identify via forward or reverse DNS.

Perhaps a more compelling example would be a "virtual CDN" that doesn't own any 
hardware or IP space.  Instead, it rents a variable number of virtual machines, 
each with an accompanying (presumed unpredictable) IP address, from a shared 
public cloud provider, and makes them available via fast-changing DNS answers.  
I don't know of a deployment like that today, but it seems like an architecture 
where the CDN's server IP addresses might not be trivial to identify.

> and all of those IPs are also used for many unrelated origins.

If Proxywerks is serving other origins from the same IP addresses, and wants 
them to be indistinguishable from ECHConfig Foo to an attacker, why doesn't it 
just give those other origins ECHConfig Foo too?

I don't understand this justification, but I also think it is unnecessary.  The 
proposal can be justified by preventing trivial distinction between traffic 
that is inside Proxywerks' network and traffic that is outside of it, if we are 
willing to assume that this is not already obvious from the server IP addresses.

--Ben Schwartz
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