Скачать или смотреть DNS Policy and Technical Call, 19th January 2026

This week, Gianpaolo Scalone of Vodafone Group discussed Source Privacy & Decentralisation Beyond ECH (Encrypted Client Hello), a topic that Gianpaolo also covered at the last IETF meeting in Montreal and that has also been picked up by the ITU’s Study Group 17 as a new work item. He explained how developments like ECH shield the target destination of a connection from an on-path observer, but do not provide any privacy for the client from an intermediary like a CDN, which sees both the client IP address and destination domain.

The Custom-Facing Relay proposal provides a mechanism to hide the source IP address in a lightweight manner, with minimal protocol changes. In addition to giving additional privacy protection to individual users, CFR reduces one of the centralisation risks of developments like ECH by making it harder for CDN operators to track user activity at global scale. Gianpaolo concluded the presentation with a call to action to join the initiative.