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Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by jgrahamc on Saturday November 12, 2022 @12:34PM (#33575190)
The insinuation is that somehow we had to stop domain fronting because “China”. That’s false.

What actually happened was we started to get reports from customers that we were serving content from unrelated sites under their domains. Wasn’t happening a lot but for a reverse proxy that’s terrifying and about as bad as it can get.

The issue was domain fronting where SNI didn’t match Host causing us to handle the traffic incorrectly sometimes (infrequently but not zero). Since standard use of the Internet doesn’t need SNI and Host: to not match we blocked the use of domain fronting very fast to ensure the integrity of our service.

Lantern was domain fronting tickling this bug and causing our customers trouble. Hence we dropped domain fronting.

I remember this well because I actually debugged it myself and reported the problem in Jira. You weren’t involved and inventing a story about “China” is dead wrong.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by FiloSottile on Saturday November 12, 2022 @12:51PM (#33575319)
As I said above, I was not involved in the deliberation, so I don't know the reason domain fronting was blocked. I clearly remember it being an explicit decision though, not a bug mitigation, and Matthew's explanation on HN makes no mention of a technical issue.

I do remember one terrifying bug that Lantern was tickling which caused responses to cross streams, and I was involved in debugging that, but it was not due to the Host/SNI mismatch. It just happened around the same time that domain fronting was blocked. (I am going to respect my confidentiality agreement here, but if you want I can share what I remember here or in private.)

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by jgrahamc on Saturday November 12, 2022 @01:35PM (#33575692)
I clearly remember it being an explicit decision though, not a bug mitigation

To be clear, that's not correct we did do this to mitigate the bug.

We were facing the bug that I described (the cross stream thing) showing up when Lantern was used. It was causing disruption to our service and customers were writing in. We were trying to understand what was happening and needed to stop it. One of the things we did to stop it was disable domain fronting. As we were seeing the customer reports we didn't know if this was an OpenSSL bug, something in NGINX, something in our code, but we did know that Lantern was somehow causing it and they were doing domain fronting which wasn't the standard use of our service and so we dropped it.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by FiloSottile on Saturday November 12, 2022 @01:52PM (#33575858)
Maybe domain fronting was initially disabled as an unsuccessful attempt to fix that bug, that's possible and as I said I was not involved in that decision. Still, if that's the case, there was a policy decision afterwards to leave it disabled, because disabling it did not fix the bug, as you seem to agree. (Again, not elaborating on the bug publicly without permission, but I remember it turned out to have nothing to do with the SNI.)

My point is that disabling domain fronting (or leaving it disabled after finding the bug's root cause) was a policy decision, not something necessary to mitigate the bug or prevent it from re-occurring.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by hungryforeggs on Saturday November 12, 2022 @04:09PM (#33577113)
I think maybe it's not the best approach to air out grudges with former employers in public. And apparently incorrect ones at that.
Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by tptacek on Saturday November 12, 2022 @11:43PM (#33580164)
Just for the record, there are very few people on the Internet I would trust more about this kind of stuff than Filippo.
Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by hungryforeggs on Sunday November 13, 2022 @07:44AM (#33582535)
That just indicates poor judgement on your part.
Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by tptacek on Sunday November 13, 2022 @12:35PM (#33585222)
I'm extraordinarily comfortable with how my comments here reflect on my judgement.
Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by eastdakota on Saturday November 12, 2022 @08:33PM (#33579044)
There are former employees who are honorable. There are others who are blatant, self-promotional liars.

Filippo: You, sadly, fall in the later camp and have for some time. You’re wrong here. You’re wrong most times you post uninformed speculation. It’s tiresome.

I wish you luck in whatever you’re doing post-Google and hope you find the success you’ve desired since our first conversation that will, I pray, stop you from your latent and seemingly unpatchable personality bug of making shit up and making yourself a more important figure in every story than you actually are or ever have been.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by dang on Sunday November 13, 2022 @01:46AM (#33580688)
Commenters aren't allowed to attack others like this on HN, regardless of how wrong the other person is or it feels like they are.

If you'd please review and follow the site guidelines, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by mapgrep on Saturday November 12, 2022 @02:11PM (#33576051)
…he says, as his company eagerly does business with Xi in China.

No organization I am part of will ever do business with you if I can stop it.

You fought for Turing but I suppose the Uyghur concentration camps mean nothing to you. They are not British so how could their lives be worth fighting for when there is money to be made (for yourself) without regard to morality or any sense of decency.

But good job doing Cloudflare PR.

Re:Tell HN: Domain fronting to be blocked on Azure by mindslight on Saturday November 12, 2022 @04:13PM (#33577151)
Could you not make domain fronting only work when the inside Host contains a specific component like start-frontin.example.com ? Then it will never work for a naive browser wanting to reach www.customer.com, but will work for non-browser clients deliberately trying to front.