this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Most ISP blocking is pretty superficial, usually just at the DNS level, you should be fine in the vast majority of cases. While parsing for the SNI flag on the client hello is technically possible, it's computationally expensive at scale, and generally avoided outside of enterprise networks.
With that siad, When in doubt, VPN out. ;)
They won't be able to get to my SNI if I'm using ECH, yes? I just assumed ECH was secure enough but I don't know much
You are absolutely correct, I should have lead with that. Encrypted client handshake means no one can see what certificate you are trying to request from the remote end of your connection, even your ISP.
However, It's worth noting though that if I am your ISP and I see you connecting to say public IP 8.8.8.8 over https (443) I don't need to see the SNI flag to know you're accessing something at Google.
First, I have a list of IP addresses of known blocked sites, I will just drop any traffic destined to that address, no other magic needed.
Second, if you target an IP that isn't blocked outright, and I can't see your SNI flag, I can still try to reverse lookup the IP myself and perform a block on your connection if the returned record matches a restricted pattern, say google.com.
VPN gets around all of these problems, provided you egress somewhere less restrictive.
Hope that helps clarify.
This is only effective when the host is the only one using that IP. Anything that uses Cloudflares WAF or similar services will just be a shared IP that responds for hundreds of hosts like one of Cloudflares Reverse Proxies.
Ah, that clears it up! I feel silly that the idea of the ISP doing a reverse-lookup on my traffic didn't occur to me, thanks.