Attacking DoH and ECH: Does Server Name Encryption Protect Users’ Privacy?

Privacy on the Internet has become a priority, and several efforts have been devoted to limit the leakage of personal information. Domain names, both in the TLS Client Hello and DNS traffic, are among the last pieces of information still visible to an observer in the network. The Encrypted Client Hello extension for TLS, DNS over HTTPS or over QUIC protocols aim to further increase network confidentiality by encrypting the domain names of the visited servers.

In this article, we check whether an attacker able to passively observe the traffic of users could still recover the domain name of websites they visit even if names are encrypted. By relying on large-scale network traces, we show that simplistic features and off-the-shelf machine learning models are sufficient to achieve surprisingly high precision and recall when recovering encrypted domain names. We consider three attack scenarios, i.e., recovering the per-flow name, rebuilding the set of visited websites by a user, and checking which users visit a given target website. We next evaluate the efficacy of padding-based mitigation, finding that all three attacks are still effective, despite resources wasted with padding. We conclude that current proposals for domain encryption may produce a false sense of privacy, and more robust techniques should be envisioned to offer protection to end users.