2026-07-02 –, Amphitheater 122
It's common for users to look to hide their IP addresses. With Oblivious HTTP, it's reversed: the service chooses to blind itself.
We'll go over how this IETF standard ended up in Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Meta products, and how it evolved.
HTTPS encrypts your request, but the server still sees your IP. That metadata alone may be enough to identify you. Oblivious HTTP (RFC 9458) splits the request across two non-colluding parties: a relay sees your IP address but not your request, a gateway sees your request but not your IP address. Assuming they don't collude, no single party sees both.
The interesting part: this is a privacy guarantee services opt into, not users. By contracting a neutral 3rd party, the service operator makes a commitment that they cannot link their own users' identity to the request these users are making.
The protocol was standardised at the IETF, and has open source implementations in Go, Rust, Kotlin, and TypeScript. I'll demo one of them - ohttp-ts - and walk through ohttp.info, built to make the protocol approachable.
Finally, we'll cover chunked OHTTP, an advanced proposal, which enables streaming encrypted payloads incrementally directly relevant for AI inference over private prompts and large transfers.
