A new privacy feature is coming to Chrome, starting with the Canary channel

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A new measure in favor of the protection of the privacy of the users arrives to Google Chrome, exactly to the current experimental version available in the Canary channel with the integration of the standard Encrypted Client Hello (ECH).

It is a new extension to the TLS security protocol (Transport Layer Security)which will prevent Internet providers and other web traffic management entities from knowing the headers of the websites that users visit.

This new technology will make it more difficult for Internet providers to block websites, either by court order or by an administrative body, or for any other reason that makes it necessary, since it protects the metadata of the headers of indication of the server name (SNI), and will also be the starting point for the TLS standard to implement new security and privacy measures in the future.

Reducing even more what the operators can know about our activity

It should be noted that web servers must also support this new standard in order to function, so currently, the vast majority of them are still incompatible with the new TLS extension.

Users of the canary channel version of Chrome who want to verify if they already have ECH available should go to the Cloudflare Browsing Experience Security Verification website, or any other that may also exist, and must first make sure they have the latest version and having enabled this feature via the flag: chrome://flags/#encrypted-client-hello

Google describes this feature as follows:

When enabled, Chrome will enable support for encrypted ClientHello. This will encrypt ClientHello TLS if the server enables the extension via HTTPS DNS record

Chrome thus joins Mozilla, which already introduced support for ECH in Firefox last year 2021, and it is quite likely that support for ECH will end up reaching the stable version, and it is also likely that this support can also be extended to other browsers Chromium-based websites.

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Via: Ghacks and elhacker.net