Russia seeks to ban concealing website names; experts call the bill ‘strange’

The Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation has tabled a bill that bans the use on Russian territory of encryption protocols that allow hiding the names of the websites and pages being visited.

Draft bill by ForkLog on Scribd

In the explanatory note to the bill it states that its adoption “will have a positive impact on identifying internet resources whose dissemination is restricted or prohibited in the Russian Federation.”

It also designates concrete protocols — “TLS 1.3, ESNI, DoH (DNS over HTTPS), DoT (DNS over TLS).”

“All of the above allows hiding the URL of the site the user intends to visit,” said ForkLog’s technical director Stanislav Shakirov of RosKomSvoboda.

For violation of the ban on using such protocols, it is proposed to block the internet resources that use them “no later than one working day from the day the violation is detected by the authority empowered to do so.”

The independent expert Alexander Isavin stressed that the general aim of most internet standards developers is to create protocols that protect the interests of the end user — for example, they hide activity from information intermediaries and malicious actors.

“If these protocols are used, then DPI equipment and the like cannot determine where the user is going. That is what this law is designed for — to make the use of such things illegal,” he says.

According to the executive director of the Internet Defence Society, Mikhail Klimarov, implementing the bill is practically impossible:

“Simply because the protocols, as designed by their developers, are intended to conceal information. Now we sit and think about how the fact of using these protocols will be recorded? The answer is — none. In other words, it is initially impossible to prove the fact of using ‘concealment protocols’.”

Stanislav Shakirov agrees that if the law is passed, nothing will change in terms of what technologies browsers will use.

“This is another law from the category of ‘we want snowdrops in a January Russian forest,’” says Alexander Isavin.

Earlier, Roskomnadzor began studying the possibilities of restricting mesh networks, IoT networks, and anonymous protocols.

They came for Tor and Telegram: will Roskomnadzor be able to kill the anonymous internet in Russia

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