Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

On https sites there's not a lot ISPs can track without breaking encryption. With shared IPs they may not even know the domain for certain (although as IPv6 takes off it will be easier to map IP to domain).


They can make a fair guess at which websites you're accessing. A lot of websites that are related to your particular interests aren't behind shared IP addresses these days.

Consider this: * Build a list of domains you're interested in. There's fun community build blocking lists that can help you, if you need it.

* Periodically resolve every domain. Odds are if you're an ISP your servers already have the records cached, but it isn't too hard to resolve them all.

* Dynamically adjust your routing to specifically re-route those IP addresses to your special infrastructure (or maybe null route it if you want to block access)

* Use your special infrastructure to build up whatever profile you want about the source IP address, which of course being an ISP you'll be able to link directly to a user. Your end user won't even know.

You'll know when they access sites, be able to build up patterns of websites they access, in which order, and spot variations in that pattern.

There's a lot you can infer from metadata without decrypting the traffic. Everything from which domains you access, ports used for the communication, what order, and what sort of size the payloads are. You could identify that someone has an email account they only access after visiting, say, the Ashley Madison website. By tracking the size of communication on that is being sent to figure out if someone is sending dick picks or some such, or if it's likely just plain text.



Wholly agree. Your whole life is reflected as in a mirror in the 'metadata' logs collected by ISPs. VPNs are essential.


They can track DNS lookups though. I use DNSCrypt to proxy all that traffic through elsewhere. But that just means I'm trusting some other third party to not log my DNS queries.


DNSCrypt -> private cloud instance DNS Crypt -> root name servers


I use dnscrypt also, figuring that even though that puts my browsing traffic in another persons hands, they can’t easily correlate it with my address, phone number, name, etc etc


Https requests still send the domain name unencrypted in the SNI extension of TLS [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication


But your DNS request went through the same ISP; It's very likely that they'd know the domain for certain because you've just looked it up.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: