One thing this can be useful for is encrypted client hello (ECH), the way TLS/HTTPS can be used without disclosing the server name to any listening devices (standard SNI names are transmitted in plaintext).

To use it, you need a valid certificate for the connection to the server which has a hostname that does get broadcast in readable form. For companies like Cloudflare, Azure, and Google, this isn't really an issue, because they can just use the name of their proxies.

For smaller sites, often not hosting more than one or two domains, there is hardly a non-distinct hostname available.

With IP certificates, the outer TLS connection can just use the IP address in its readable SNI field and encrypt the actual hostname for the real connection. You no longer need to be a third party proxying other people's content for ECH to have a useful effect.

That doesn't work, as neither SNI nor the server_name field of the ECHConfig are allowed to contain IP addresses: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-tls-esni-25.html#...

Even if it did work, the privacy value of hiding the SNI is pretty minimal for an IP address that hosts only a couple domains, as there are plenty of databases that let you look up an IP address to determine what domain names point there - e.g. https://bgp.tools/prefix/18.220.0.0/14#dns

I don't really see the value in ECH for self-hosted sites regardless. It works for Cloudflare and similar because they have millions of unrelated domains behind their IP addresses, so connecting to their IPs reveals essentially nothing, but if your IP is only used for a handful of related things then it's pretty obvious what's going on even if the SNI is obscured.

As far as I understand you cannot use IP address as the outer certificate as per https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-tls-esni-25.txt

> In verifying the client-facing server certificate, the client MUST interpret the public name as a DNS-based reference identity [RFC6125]. Clients that incorporate DNS names and IP addresses into the same syntax (e.g. Section 7.4 of [RFC3986] and [WHATWG-IPV4]) MUST reject names that would be interpreted as IPv4 addresses.