Domain Fronting
ππ¨π¦ππ’π§ π π«π¨π§ππ’π§π is an intriguing evasion technique that can be employed in both malicious contexts and to circumvent internet censorship in authoritarian regimes.
This method typically capitalizes on the capability to specify a different host header in HTTPS requests, distinct from the requested destination.
It commonly involves utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that hosts numerous domains, encompassing both the front domain and the target domain.
Basically, we can hide an HTTPS request to a βbadβ site inside a TLS connection to a βgoodβ site.
In the demonstration below, we illustrate a hypothetical scenario where βawsβ is blocked, but βamazonβ is not, and how we can still access βawsβ using this technique (you can test this by βblockingβ aws domain locally by modifying your hosts file):
wget --tries 1 --timeout=3 https://aws.amazon.com
Operation timed out
wget -q -O - https://www.amazon.com --header 'Host: aws.amazon.com' | grep -o '<title>.*</title>'
<title>Cloud Computing Services - Amazon Web Services (AWS)</title>
If you wish to assist in preventing internet censorship, you can volunteer to run Snowflake.
Snowflake is a proxy that employs domain fronting to enable access to the Tor network: