28 ms·

Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH

541 points by websirnik 6y ago

new23d 6y ago
> ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested Who is the proxy here, and who the DNS resolver?
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  This is a protocol, not a product. There is no set proxy, or resolver.
- new23d 6y ago
  From the CloudFlare blog post: > A key component of ODoH is a proxy that is disjoint from the target resolver. Today, we’re launching ODoH with several leading proxy partners, including: PCCW, SURF, and Equinix.
nuker 6y ago
Why not DoT? And DoH is mum on http cookies: "Determining whether or not a DoH implementation requires HTTP cookie support is particularly important because HTTP cookies are the primary state tracking mechanism in HTTP." https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8484 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8484
nalekberov 6y ago
The more these big corporations involves in this process, the more we are gonna lose our privacy. Centralization and too much power in certain amount of hands are the source of all evil.
jamescun 6y ago
Preventing the target resolver from seeing client's IP address breaks GeoDNS. This is already a problem with 1.1.1.1 which doesn't honour the EDNS client subnet extension. Given generally DNS is just the start of an intereaction, usually followed by the connection directly between the client and intended destination, I don't see what kind of snooping these privacy measures are there to prevent.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Valid points, but... > Preventing the target resolver from seeing client's IP address breaks GeoDNS. If the proxy and the target are in the same metro as the user, it shouldn't really matter. > This is already a problem with 1.1.1.1 which doesn't honour the EDNS client subnet extension. 1.1.1.1 runs at Cloudflare's edge. Most likely it is recursing DNS from more or less the same location as the user and so ECS isn't really required when in fact it exposes the client unnecessarily to upstream name-servers. > I don't see what kind of snooping these privacy measures are there to prevent. The one where DNS resolvers build to sell browsing profile of its users?
  - snarf21 6y ago
    Aren't these DNS resolvers largely the ISP anyway? They know where any packets are going anyway for each user. Seems to be a trivial hurdle to jump.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mike_d 6y ago
    > If the proxy and the target are in the same metro as the user, it shouldn't really matter. Having ran one of the largest public DNS resolvers on the internet, I can tell you it is a big problem. GeoIP providers do not have the fine grained data to be able to tell that a resolvers unicast address is in Seattle vs Chicago for example. Cloudflare doesn't care about edns-client-subnet because the only downside is that other CDNs appear slower to their users.
- absolutelyrad 6y ago
  As I see this, this is a very clever move by Cloudflare. It's intentional to force websites to move to their CDN or atleast use a CDN with anycast and prevent you from making your own CDN like you could cheaply before (spinning up DO droplets and doing loadbalancing with geo DNS).
deleted 6y ago
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TimWolla 6y ago
Probably better source, the blog post at Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344220
- aorth 6y ago
  Thanks. The original post redirects to: https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_4c6c8655-d917-4ccc-bf76-c5518ee16f50 https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_... Which is blocked at the DNS level on my network.
  - jessmay 6y ago
    As it should be.
- dang 6y ago
  Thanks! we've changed to that from https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-design-a-new-privacy-friendly-internet-protocol/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-desig....
seek3r 6y ago
I’m good with the Apple’s privacy-oriented stance. But I can’t stop to think what will happen when advertisers knock on Apple’s door trying to get their hands on the users’ data that one else can access. Is Apple going to sell it out for more profits?
- techelite 6y ago
  It's just marketing. Apple has already shown they will sell you out with PRISM. Who knows what other backroom deals are happening outside our knowledge. The only reason we found out about PRISM is because the gigantic scale and Snowden sacrificed Everything to let it be known.
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    One thing I like to remind people of is the fact that the Snowden docs that revealed PRISM were years old at the time of Snowden gathering them, and even older at release... just imagine how much further things have progressed in the 10+ years since. (iirc lots of them had 2007 dates on them)
  - saberience 6y ago
    I think there's a big difference between selling data for profit and the government literally forcing you to give up data based on national security laws or else forcing you to close your business. There's almost nothing Apple can do about the latter case (or any other company for that matter).
    - techelite 6y ago
      Didn't twitter survive? Also how would we know if Apple is working with other companies? It's not like they are known to be transparent or Truthful.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 6y ago
landerwust 6y ago
Opened this post expecting to be hating on another power grab dressed up as protocol engineering, but this one seems to actively /reduce/ the centralization of user data collection in DoH. Props to Cloudflare, I'm impressed.
- syshum 6y ago
  I still have doubts, 1.1.1.1 was a clear power grab and effort to control more of the internet. DoH in partnership with Mozilla was an extension of that So I am still suspect of their motives but maybe the negative PR got to be too much
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Avtomatk 6y ago
  I would like someone to correct me if I am wrong, but I think we can never have 100% privacy because the destination IPs cannot be encrypted or hidden, so as long as the destination IP can be observed, the server that you are connecting at can be obtained (I know a server can host many web pages, but this requires the port, which cannot be encrypted either). So I don't know to what extent this protocol can be useful.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I'm more worried about persistent, authenticated/ID-linked TCP connections (e.g. APNS) providing the client IP over time to an application service provider (e.g. Apple, Slack, Google, Microsoft, et c), that is, city-level geolocation track history via geoip, than I am the ISP or carrier snooping on what websites I connect to. Every iPhone connects to APNS for push notifications and stays connected, and, last I looked at the protocol, the client certificate was linked to the device serial number. That's quite a geoip tracklog dataset, and AFAIK you can't turn it off. It's to the point now that to keep my city-level location private from Apple, I'm not putting SIMs in any of my iPhones/iPads any longer, and carrying a battery powered VPN travel router (with a SIM uplink in it) for them to talk to. Super annoying that it has to come to this.
TimWolla 6y ago
So, having read the blog post from Cloudflare I don't understand why the proxy (needs to terminate|terminates) TLS. I thought HTTPS proxying (or rather: Any TCP protocol) was a solved problem by the HTTP CONNECT verb or SOCKS proxies. What am I missing?
- landerwust 6y ago
  The user's IP address is masqueraded by the proxy, and neither the DNS mothership (Cloudflare) nor the ISP get to see both who the user is and what they requested. It's an extremely desirable property DoH currently lacks
  - TimWolla 6y ago
    Yes, I understand that. But I don't understand what ODoH does better than a run of the mill SOCKS proxy, such as Tor.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - landerwust 6y ago
      Tor is not a run of the mill SOCKS proxy, not least in that it inserts arbitrarily high latency into the user data path. On the other hand, an actual run of the mill SOCKS proxy would have visibility of the user's queries and their identity, defeating the purpose of the design.
      - TimWolla 6y ago
        > an actual run of the mill SOCKS proxy would have visibility of the user's queries and their identity, defeating the purpose of the design. Why would it have visibility of the queries? If I send a TLS connection (containing my DoH query) through that SOCKS proxy, then the SOCKS proxy is unable to decrypt that TLS connection without breaking certificate verification and thus can't read my DoH query.
ignoramous 6y ago
Key bits from the Cloudflare blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ > The target [resolver] sees only the [DNS] query and the proxy’s IP address. The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target. Only the intended target [resolver] can read the content of the [DNS] query and produce a [DNS] response. > The whole process begins with clients that encrypt their query for the target using HPKE. Clients obtain the target’s public key via DNS, where it is bundled into a [SVCB/HTTPS] HTTPS resource record and protected by DNSSEC. > Clients transmit these encrypted queries to a proxy over an HTTPS connection. Upon receipt, the proxy forwards the query to the designated target. The target then decrypts the query, produces a response by sending the query to a recursive resolver such as 1.1.1.1, and then encrypts the response to the client. The encrypted query from the client contains encapsulated keying material from which targets derive the response encryption symmetric key. > ...50% of the time ODoH queries are resolved in fewer than 228ms. BTW, DNSCrypt supports "oblivious" encrypted DNS queries via what it calls Anonymized Relays https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Anonymized-DNS https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Anonymized-D...
- landerwust 6y ago
  DNSCrypt needs meaningful industry support otherwise it's sadly irrelevant. I think by now we can all agree "industry support" basically means the 3 browser vendors. DoH has at least Mozilla and Google on board, and presumably Microsoft are tailing along.
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    > DoH has at least Mozilla and Google on board, and presumably Microsoft are tailing along. Note that DoH (and DoT) shipped in iOS 14 and Big Sur, though aren't particularly easy to enable.
    - xoa 6y ago
      >Note that DoH (and DoT) shipped in iOS 14 and Big Sur, though aren't particularly easy to enable. Specifically, you must install a properly configured .mobileprofile with HTTPS/TLS in the DNSSettings > DNSProtocol part of the payload (along with DNS server addresses of course). Merely pointing at a DoH/DoT supporting DNS server in the settings GUI won't do it, the OS doesn't do any probing and automatically use it just because it's available. For applications DNS Settings is covered under the Network Extension framework [0]. It's definitely nice Apple now has this built-in, and since they're onboard with Cloudflare/Fastly maybe this new twist will be pretty fast too. But obviously they're going to have to make this more automated for it to really make a widespread difference, ideally it'd simply see if the supplied DNS server (manual or DHCP) could run DoH/DoT and then just use it by default with no interaction required. ---- 0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/dns_settings https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/d...
techelite 6y ago
I urge people to stop repeating Apple Advertising. Claims of privacy and security are debunked weekly. You put yourself at risk if you believe it.
- xondono 6y ago
  Debunked where? If they were I’d expect HN to be the first to publish
  - techelite 6y ago
    Yes, they are here every week. There are soooooo many examples. You want iphone security? Google iphone security. Hit news. You want Apple privacy? Google, Apple privacy. Hit news. This isn't obscure at all. It's a weekly event.
- selykg 6y ago
  Do you have actual proof of this or are you just going to make misleading claims yourself?
  - nalekberov 6y ago
    Privacy is a buzzword to boost sales even more. Perhaps the biggest problem with Apple is its nasty monopoly strategies, remember the times you could easily add more RAM, change batteries?
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      This buzzword is actually useful though. It gave us ESNI, Cambridge Analytica, antimonopoly memes and whatnot.
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  Your statement is 100% correct but misses the entire point https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-100-correct-but.html?m=1 https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-10...
londons_explore 6y ago
When you need a log-log plot to make the performance degradation not look so severe, you have issues...
- 3r8riacz 6y ago
  145 ms response time when DNScrypt is around 10-25 ms, and anonimized DNScrypt is around 2-3x, wow
theamk 6y ago
This seems to require DNSSEC as a key function. @tptacek ?
- tptacek 6y ago
  It has nothing to do with DNSSEC.
  - theamk 6y ago
    Huh? They say this: > The whole process begins with clients that encrypt their query for the target using HPKE. Clients obtain the target’s public key via DNS, where it is bundled into a HTTPS resource record and protected by DNSSEC. When the TTL for this key expires, clients request a new copy of the key as needed (just as they would for an A/AAAA record when that record’s TTL expires). The usage of a target’s DNSSEC-validated public key guarantees that only the intended target can decrypt the query and encrypt a response (answer). So this looks like relies on DNSSEC as a core part of its security, and that any resolvers willing to participate in this protocol would have to set up one.
    - alwillis 6y ago
      Thank you for the part regarding DNSSEC--I was just about to post the same thing.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Oh, gross! I missed that; I read the TechCrunch article and thought I understand what they were going for. Thanks for the correction. That's disgusting.
cblconfederate 6y ago
> Sullivan said a few partner organizations are already running proxies, allowing for early adopters to begin using the technology through Cloudflare’s existing 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. In other words, in order to thwart efforts to make the internet anonymous , US companies are planning to takeover DNS for the vast majority of people.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  Oh, please. ODoH is a proposed standard. Use whatever the hell proxy/resolver you feel like, wherever you like. DNS is a shit show of unencrypted data flying around being scooped up by God-knows-who and along comes someone proposing a standard to fix said shit show and this is the response people get.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Decentralized spying > centralized spying
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Choosing to have google or quad9 spy on you doesn't mean AT&T no longer gets your DNS data when you use plain port 53.
  - corford 6y ago
    Would have been a million times better if cloudflare had used it's considerable clout and resources to push/lobby for widescale DoT adoption rather than this fucking Frankenstein shit show that is DoH (now with even more garbage attached to it in the form of a proxy)
izacus 6y ago
So Google got sued by ISPs which lobbied an investigation by DOJ for trying to encrypt DNS: https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-29-congress-doj-scrutinze-google-encrypted-dns.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-29-congress-doj-scrutinze-g... Will ISPs be too scared to sue Apple and Cloudflare for this? Or are they giving them an out?
- floo 6y ago
  If I understand this correctly this was mostly about Google getting an unfair advantage over the ISPs. Which wouldn't be the case if everyone loses access to the IP + DNS request info.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
So I do wonder how such systems can be designed or implemented such that geoip systems can still work. While I'm sure aws route53 and cloudflare's own routing systems can handle this properly, Cloud isn't quite the answer. Not every workload fits on the cloud (see: Discord, which runs on leased servers), and a system that breaks down if your rented datacenters aren't in alignment with Cloud operating regions doesn't make a great solution.
- notamy 6y ago
  > Not every workload fits on the cloud (see: Discord, which runs on leased servers) As far as I'm aware (don't work there), only bandwidth/CPU-heavy stuff like voice and video live on rented dedis; the core chat services live in GCP.
- dylz 6y ago
  Discord already doesn't need geoip, since they just direct you at wherever the server location (that you chose) is
teddyh 6y ago
Sounds promising. Get back to me when it’s gotten to the RFC stage. A ready-made solution thrown over the wall like this, is rarely what is ultimately adopted.
freebuju 6y ago
Misleading title. Apple devices are not anywhere near ready to utilize this dns protocol. Apart from that, yeah let's shift our dns trust to one of the biggest data resolvers! The irony... Encrypted dns might be already in use by government or military agencies, but they know too well the effects of cascading this tech down to the masses. They will never let this reach the public.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alwillis 6y ago
  Apple devices are not anywhere near ready to utilize this dns protocol. The latest versions of macOS and iOS already support DoH and DoT; Apple could push an update tomorrow to enable ODoH tomorrow if they wanted to. Encrypted dns might be already in use by government or military agencies, but they know too well the effects of cascading this tech down to the masses. They will never let this reach the public. You do know we've had encrypted DNS for years, right? It has some issues, which this new protocol is designed to address. There's no reason to believe "they" can or will intervene to stop ODoH.
  - freebuju 6y ago
    I don't think you understand how DNS works. DoT and DoH should not be confused for encrypted DNS. Encrypted dns is still a myth to most users. Major resolvers do not support it since it directly conflicts with with their data collection business. All forms of Internet communications can be largely encrypted. Dns is the last frontier remaining. It remains so for good reason...
    - alwillis 6y ago
      I don't think you understand how DNS works. I don't think you're in a position to comment on what I do or don't know about DNS. Encrypted dns is still a myth to most users. Major resolvers do not support it since it directly conflicts with with their data collection business. Except those users using Firefox or Chrome, which come with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) preconfigured. Or those who've been running DoT on their home networks, which I setup quite a while ago now. From the Wikipedia article on DoH, emphasis mine: "A goal of the method is to increase user privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle attacks[1] by using the HTTPS protocol to encrypt the data between the DoH client and the DoH-based DNS resolver. DNS over TLS (DoT) RFC: "This document describes the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide privacy for DNS. Encryption provided by TLS eliminates opportunities for eavesdropping and on-path tampering with DNS queries in the network, such as discussed in RFC 7626." The lack of DNS encryption isn't what Apple and Cloudflare are addressing; it's that whoever runs the DNS resolver can still see the websites you're visiting and ODoH fixes that.
darkwater 6y ago
Until we get rid of SNI[1] in HTTPS for good there will still be providers (like my ISP) that do deep packet inspection on SNI and kill the connection right away if you happen to visit a forbidden site (and this was western Europe, yesterday, on a site behind CloudFlare) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  About getting rid of SNI... https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/ Been working on that also.
  - darkwater 6y ago
    I wanted to link CF efforts on this also but somehow I forgot. Thanks for sharing and I really hope you are successful at this because what I experienced yesterday was really infuriating. Even if having everything behind a CDN to avoid ISP spying is still not the optimal solution, but at least is an improvement given what ISPs have already shown.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  You can bypass SNI inspection [0] with tools like GreenTunnel [1] and Intra [2]. [0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22654737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22654737 [2] https://getintra.org/ https://getintra.org/
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    I can't find any source on intra working to prevent SNI sniffing. The page itself only mentions DNS, and Googling doesn't reveal any other source for that. E: NVM, found it. It does like it uses split hellos.
    - deleted 6y ago
clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
I'm wondering how they still get good performance with a proxy server in between, the plots seem quite close to each other (maybe because logarithmic?). Also, not sure how useful the Tor comparison is, since Tor does 3 hops as opposed to their 1 so it would be a shame if it doesn't beat that.
jaimex2 6y ago
Whats the point? Governments subpoena the information or just block the protocol outright. ( or in China, get it delivered to their door by Apple ) Commercial parties have a bag full of tricks from fingerprinting to embeds on the page itself to track you. Privacy seeking users are already tunneling their traffic. That leaves script kiddies at Internet cafes. TLS kind of fixed that already so... Good work?
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  As it stated in the article, ISPs tracking and selling the data. Exactly that, no more, no less.
- alecco 6y ago
  You, the proxy, and the DNS service, can be in 3 different countries. It's not bullet proof but makes it quite hard for a single government. Unless you are a Bond villain I think this is more than you need. If you need more than that use ToR or similar.
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    While I agree that it's a step forward you should proxy your whole traffic anyways if you want to enjoy the benefits of encrypted DNS. Otherwise intermediaries routing your packets can still see what you connect to by looking at the IP header (or SNI, if not encrypted). DoH/DoT is still useful because it allows you to proxy your DNS over Tor (for example) without having to worry about tampering (or surveillance if you also use separate circuits per domain).
crumbshot 6y ago
This is a neat design, but, does this not just shift the issue of trust as to whether the proxy and the target are colluding: > However, each of these guarantees relies on one fundamental property — that the proxy and the target servers do not collude. So long as there is no collusion, an attacker succeeds only if both the proxy and target are compromised. I'm not sure how an end user would be expected to assess this any more than they could ascertain whether any particular DoH/DoT provider is as trustworthy as they claim.
- wp381640 6y ago
  Add a few more proxy hops and you’ve effectively reinvented Tor
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    reinvented Tor, but with extra steps and less security
    - asutekku 6y ago
      But probably faster.
      - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        Yes, just like a proxy or a VPN. Faster - but it does not solve the problem.
  - theamk 6y ago
    .. but the version of Tor which does not raise alarms on every corporate firewall/IDS system
- diegocg 6y ago
  Well, this could probably encourage the creation of privacy-oriented proxys (they just have to forward queries, so it should be relatively inexpensive compared to a full DNS server). What is the likehood of someone getting logs from Cloudflare (who promises it does not keep logs, but let's assume it does) and at the same time hacks into some random privay-oriented organization? Of course, one might imagine a State actor using all their resources to do just that. But this would be a very complex attack. At least, it would stop all kind of ad tracking. The worst part of this proposal is that it will further centralize the DNS infrastructure.
thrwaway2020aug 6y ago
I'm surprised to see Cloudflare and Apple collaborating on privacy. What does Cloudflare think of Safari's new CNAME-cloaking detection to block cookies? https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-tracking-defense/ https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac... The reason I ask is because Cloudflare's "orange cloud" DNS mitigates that protection because it prevents Safari from detecting the cloak. On the other hand, I haven't run into many engineers who think CNAME-cloaking actually hurts privacy in light of Safari's other efforts to partition local storage. Does Cloudflare think it would be help privacy for Apple to know the final IPs behind orange cloud DNS?
gwbas1c 6y ago
I suspect that practical matters will interfere with widespread adoption of encrypted DNS. In my state, Comcast is going to start charging heavy bandwidth users extra. After a few people get surprise bills, I suspect that lawmakers will require that internet providers break down a bill by application.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  After seeing similar things throughout the years, I feel like that is very doubtful. When tested, the push for privacy is much stronger than the push for cost.
- api 6y ago
  I’d just get Starlink. Even if the deal was worse in terms of cost it would be a way to say fuck you to the ISP. Without some way to do that ISPs will not be able to get away with such customer hostile behavior.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > Without some way to do that ISPs will not be able to get away with such customer hostile behavior. I guess it won't take long until the first community or HOA decides to ban Starlink dish installations for faked "optical nuisance" issues.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      The fcc will have something to say about that. They've already banned rules against antennas and sat dishes for TV.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Faked? What other reason would an HOA have to ban them?
      - supertrope 6y ago
        A cable company offers to wire the neighborhood saving the builder some money. In exchange the HOA setup by the builder bans satellite dishes. In more annoying cases the HOA negotiates a group plan included in your HOA assessment bill; that really stifles competition because paying for an alternative on top of cable is irrational. The FCC banned satellite dish bans back in the 90s. Apartment building operators still do this scam. The incumbent cable company will share revenue in exchange for the landlord refusing any competitor wiring. Rent seeking in ISP markets is peanuts compared with zoning though. If real estate was much less supply constrained landlords would never fathom annoying a customer with inferior utilities.
joshspankit 6y ago
I understand why Cloudflare wants this (marketing, as well as being able to serve their customer’s content through restrictions, thus making them more valuable to those customers), but why does Apple want this? My knee-jerk is that they want to further hide/make unstoppable things like the Gatekeeper network checks, but there has to be more right?
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  It is part of their marketing. The fact that others sell or actively use your data, e.g. google, facebook, microsoft, apple was handed the opportunity to charge a premium for the absence of such tracking and data usage. If you watch the presentations, they branded/poised themselves as the privacy centric approach.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    I see your point about how they (will) position it, but I’m still curious about their actual motives.
    - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
      Exactly that. It strengthens their image amidst the whole ordeal with app signatures. It is equivalent to investing for an ad.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      As a preface, I am about to describe something I personally view as absolutely horrific. Please, dear reader, in no way interpret these comments as approving. Privacy is a luxury. It's something rich people buy and poor people can't afford to concern themselves with. Apple sells a luxury product, and has no particular stake in invading customer privacy at the moment (iAd was never successful enough to change that). So they add a feature to their status symbol to address the concerns of their customer base and work with a partner company that can actually deploy it.
- simonh 6y ago
cannabis_sam 6y ago
Has Google produced any similar initiatives?
ksm1717 6y ago
Interesting that apple is increasing its stake in privacy. On all their billboards and advertisements of course they like to present it as a boon to the customer. More importantly, I think it’s a negative for personal data hungry competitors while being relatively unrelated to Apples business
- atonse 6y ago
  Yup I just see this as an alignment of interests. In this case, Apple's interest happens to align with that of their consumers. And I for one am happy that they have taken up this cause and put their weight behind it, whatever their intentions may be, the effect is that it makes the web more private for those of us who deem it important to move away from the "monetizing data" cancer that has spread all over the internet.
  - andiareso 6y ago
    This seems suspicious to me. Apple does most if not all ML/data-mining on the device where-as competitors do it in the cloud. My assumption is they are positioning themselves this way to grab consumers later should regulations hit cloud services collecting data externally. Apple can say it is all on device and don't have access while other companies will have to say they have your data. Ultimately the motives are the same.
John_Westra 6y ago
I would love to see Firefox be an early adopter of this, regain market share and save us all from Chrome!
akvadrako 6y ago
If anyone wants the draft RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pauly-dprive-oblivious-doh-03 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pauly-dprive-oblivious-doh...
throwaway54235 6y ago
REMINDER: Research proves that it's easy to correlate IP addresses in HTTP[S] connections with the domain you are connecting to with a very high success rate. You can resolve the websites from the Alexa top 100k list and create a ipaddr -> website map that will successfully apply to 90% of Internet traffic without ambiguity. A lot of research papers also show how easy it is to fingerprint and detect a TLS handshake. Assuming the SNI problem is going to be solved, the other problems are still here. TL;DR: use Tor.
mlegner 6y ago
The basic idea makes sense to me and it's great to see efforts to improve DNS privacy. However, I'm not really convinced by Cloudflare's analysis of the processing overhead: The blog post only discusses how the proxying and encryption affect latency but not the processing at the server. In contrast to plain DoH (or DoT), where only symmetric cryptography is used after the first set-up, ODoH requires asymmetric cryptography (which is several orders of magnitude slower) for each individual request. The "less than 1ms" that they claim for the 99th percentile is no problem for the client but it is a problem for the resolver. Asymmetric cryptography is also used for verifying DNSSEC responses, but this is only necessary for records that are not cached. On the other hand, an ODoH resolver may require to set up and keep track of a lower number of TLS connections as the number of proxies is likely smaller than the number of clients.
TrueDuality 6y ago
The biggest and most consistent downside I see with these DNS enhancements is that it prevents filtering at the network level. Querying nameservers is being pushed into applications themselves to support these new features (such as Chrome and Firefox), which bypasses any system resolvers configured on the host. In most cases there is no way to signal from the network that it is not desirable to do this (Firefox being the sole exception). There also is no good way for enterprises to centrally manage these settings. DNS is a major source of information when doing threat hunting on a network and having that go dark is a big problem. Enterprises aside, there has been a rise of people using solutions like pi-hole in their home networks to filter out traffic not just for ads, but known malicious domains, and telemetry trackers (which Apple does get filtered by, only calling them out specifically because they have an active interest in not being filtered like this). Yes I think it's also a problem that ISPs are snooping and selling this information, but I think that is a less severe problem than rampant malware infections and the excessive collection of online usage data in the telemetry systems present in every webapp, OS, mobile, or IoT device. This increases privacy in one place, while making it much harder to actively protect yourself from the more aggressive and invasive sources of data collection.
- hkt 6y ago
  Applications still have fallback though, right? If so, I foresee blocks on DoH/etc to common resolvers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1. I'll be blocking them at home on the assumption that I only want regular DNS lookups so I can point them to my own DNS server etc.
  - 0x426577617265 6y ago
    Blocking traffic for known DoH services would be trivial. How about blocking unknown, how would you block that?
    - dhaavi 6y ago
      Think out of the box: Just don't let the app connect to an IP it has not resolved a domain name for. That's what we can do with the Portmaster (https://github.com/safing/portmaster https://github.com/safing/portmaster). Check it out!
elliottinvent 6y ago
> Cloudflare is committed to end-user privacy. Pretty crucial hyphen
karmakaze 6y ago
In a nutshell: client encrypts to proxy, which decrypts & removes client info, then asks resolver. > “What ODoH is meant to do is separate the information about who is making the query and what the query is,” said Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare’s head of research. > In other words, ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested. Sullivan said that page loading times on ODoH are “practically indistinguishable” from DoH and shouldn’t cause any significant changes to browsing speed.
- nathcd 6y ago
  > client encrypts to proxy, which decrypts & removes client info This is incorrect; the proxy doesn't decrypt. It just proxies. From https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ : > The target decrypts queries encrypted by the client, via a proxy. Similarly, the target encrypts responses and returns them to the proxy. [...] The proxy does as a proxy is supposed to do, in that it forwards messages between client and target.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. So client encrypts for the resolver and sends an opaque payload to the proxy.
g42gregory 6y ago
Do I understand this correctly that if DoH is implemented, none of the firewalls will be able to block the web sites? Including the pi-hole firewalls, as an example. If that's the case, this situation can't stand for long. Does this meant that the DoH would need to be extended to allow firewalls to decrypt it? If not, here is a PaloAlto Networks blog advertising capability to block all DoH traffic, presumably at work [0]. It looks like you might not be able to use DoH at work, the way it currently stands. I wonder what would be the right solution? [0] https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/blogs/protecting-organizations-in-a-world-of-doh-and-dot/ba-p/313171 https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/blogs/protecting-organi...
- DoctorOW 6y ago
  What's stopping your PiHole from just getting its own HTTPS cert?
  - g42gregory 6y ago
    I am still a noob to the networking. I just started using OpenWrt router to manage my home network. OpenWrt has an option to enable DNS over HTTPS. Is this all one would need to do in order for the firewall rules still work with the DoH browsers?
- 1over137 6y ago
  >Do I understand this correctly that if... You understand correctly. DoH mostly defeats pihole and the like. Presumably Google and other ad companies love this.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  DoH isn't blocking anything that any existing application can already bypass. It merely points out the fact that the rise in encryption makes it difficult for third parties to administer the software running your device. DoH will not be extended to allow firewalls to decrypt it. The entire point of DoH is that firewalls cannot do that. It's not hard for an administrator to set up their own DoH server, though, so there is no need as long as that server can be configured at the network level. This is currently possible through group policies on Windows and most MDM applications on mobile devices. The nice thing about encryption is that only the software and the server know what is being exchanged. The not-so-nice thing about encryption is that only the software and the server know what is being exchanged. You already can't see the difference between your computer connecting to some S3 bucket to download a picture of a cat or malware connecting to a S3 bucket to get a list of IP addresses mapped to host names. It's possible to run fully-fledged VPNs that look exactly like normal HTTPS traffic on the network level. DoH changes nothing about that. On enterprise networks, IT administrators can already put measures into place that prevent DoH on support applications and restrict HTTPS connections to trusted hosts (through SNI sniffing + validating the connection). The upcoming encrypted SNI will make this harder, but group policy will be able to disable eSNI on any trusted computers and browsers, leading only untrusted software to be unverifiable, which can then be reasonably classified as malicious. If IT administrators cannot put measures on employees' devices then... well, they've already lost. Before DoH, they just didn't know that they'd lost yet. Palo Alto currently blocks DoH by decrypting all TLS traffic (ranging from cookie recipes to naked pictures your phone is syncing to the cloud) with a man-in-the-middle attack which requires their certificate authority to be installed on your system. They filter out the DNS requests inside those TLS streams and apply some kind of rule to them. Right now, they can either block the requests or change the contents (as long as the website and/or client doesn't use DNSSEC). With ODoH, changing the contents will no longer be practical, but blocking the connection will be. Together with decent group policy settings, networks with such a setup should be as safe as they were without ODoH. On a side note: these types of middleboxes are often trying to be transparent and silently violate many standards, breaking stuff that works on every normal network. Stuff like these firewalls are the reason that TLS 1.3 is pretending to be a special type of TLS 1.2 every time it connects, because otherwise some big middlebox vendors' platforms freak out and kill the connection. I doubt the inevitable transition towards HTTP/3 or even HTTP/4 will do these boxes much good. I don't put a lot of faith in devices like this.
CyberRabbi 6y ago
All security theatre while SNI is still universally deployed. Even then most IP blocks are static and easily correlated to source site. A tor-like solution is the only real solution for this threat model
eh78ssxv2f 6y ago
What a stark difference between Google and Apple/Cloudflare. Apple/Cloudflare are working on privacy-friendly protocols that reduce the amount of information exposed to them. At exactly the same time, Google is working on proxying browser traffic through them without any consents [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337995
- PikachuEXE 6y ago
  I guess all the user "consent" for Google proxying (spying) users are included in the ocean of ToC text Thus I am using Google Chrome only for Web Dev
benlivengood 6y ago
Metadata privacy is very hard to solve and traffic analysis of non-Tor traffic is pretty accurate, which is also applicable to CDN traffic regardless of how well DNS is protected. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1158/paper2.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1158/paper2.pdf
ajnin 6y ago
At what point should we just throw out IP out of the window and figure out something new ? OK maybe not IP since all hardware infrastructure is based on it, but the whole idea of associating services to publicly open ports on the target machine. I'm thinking connections should be encrypted at the operating system level and then services would plug in at some higher level in a way that cannot be detected by outside observers.
zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
No hubris here at all. But seriously, fuck this protocol and fuck every other BigCorp-sponsored protocol to remake the Internet. We the People Who Implement Protocols are too busy keeping the lights on to chase incremental, nice-to-have improvements.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Would you believe that HTTP/1.1 was made by people from Microsoft, Xerox, and Compaq with the sole purpose of being a nice-to-have improvement over an existing widely-used protocol, HTTP/1.0? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
phlhar 6y ago
The title of the article is really misleading. I though of a succesor to IPv6 and not DNS. It shouldn't say "internet protocol", thats technically not correct
Lammy 6y ago
It bothers me how "privacy" has been redefined in recent years to mean "encrypted" and not "surveillance-resistant". We keep building things that make more requests I can't terminate locally, e.g. to a PiHole. Never forget the lesson in "Using Metadata to find Paul Revere": https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- Kalium 6y ago
  As another HN user put it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 > Administering devices with network settings is convenient, but rapidly vanishing because there's no technical difference between you administering your local network and a totalitarian ISP administering their users. Your ability to terminate things locally means that finding Paul Revere with metadata isn't needed. It's a lot of work when you can just directly look at all your country's traffic.
  - hkt 6y ago
    People in totalitarian regimes aren't safe. This is kind of a given. What everyone everywhere can resist, though, is corporate surveillance. That's the aim people should have.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      You're absolutely right. Corporate surveillance can, should, and must be resisted. It is perhaps worth considering carefully if exposing most people to surveillance they are not equipped to defend against from lots of entities (such as with typical DNS) is an improvement over something like Oblivious DoH. It might even offer some protection against some totalitarian governments in some cases. Again, you're completely right. Protecting people from corporate surveillance is very important! I just think it might be worth considering that we don't have a perfect answer at the moment, and some subtlety in how we think about this might be in order.
    - core-questions 6y ago
jlgaddis 6y ago
Even better, IMO, would be if all targets were also proxies and a client could choose -- at "query time" -- any combination of (proxy, target) that they prefer. If you wanted to go a step further, you can even allow "chaining" of proxies, such that the path a query takes might be, in an extreme example, similar to how Tor operates: Client -> Proxy 1 -> Proxy 2 -> Proxy 3 -> Target -> Resolver -- Anyways, this is kinda sorta interesting, I guess, but honestly I'm more excited by and looking forward to the (hopefully!) eventual adoption and roll-out of "DNS SVCB and HTTPS RRs" [0] -- one of the other I-Ds (linked in the OP) on which ODoH is built -- and I suspect many other HN'ers will be as well (although I'd happily settle for SRV RR support in browsers). -- [0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https-02 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https-02
- vanshg 6y ago
  Sounds like Tor/Onion Routing?
dang 6y ago
All: We changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-design-a-new-privacy-friendly-internet-protocol/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-desig... to the more detailed source, but you might want to read both.
deleted 6y ago
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OJFord 6y ago
What's the advantage of this over specifying a DoH provider (as we do today with plain DNS)? Unfortunately I suppose the only way to really do that is with a resolv file (adlist/blocklist) of DoH hosts (which exist) but instead of pointing to 0.0.0.0, point to <preferred DoH>. Edit - d'oh! I see it now - that would mean DoH provider knows query and IP, whereas here the ODoH proxy knows your IP but not the query. Nice.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
Is it not still possible to do a pi-hole kind of setup for DoH or ODoH? All you have to do is setup the server as a proxy for all http(s) connections on top of DNS connections and trust its cert on the client. If we can reliably block all ad networks with uBlock origin, picking out DNS requests from other http requests should be even simpler, right?
aftbit 6y ago
Can the proxies be (ab)used to proxy arbitrary HTTPS traffic?
hkt 6y ago
DNS privacy for DoH effectively means we all lose the ability to control what our devices are connecting to. In particular, we can't block ads and trackers at the network level. The lack of fallback to regular DNS in the spec means we will choose between devices that track us while they work, or devices that are broken.
exabrial 6y ago
Hilariously I see privacy invading advertisers loving this. No more DNS blocking ad traffic! And since it's only a matter of time before Apple removes root access on their PCs, it puts them in complete control off what you see.
geogriffin 6y ago
Why encrypt the first hop? Why isn't this just plain DoH with a simple CONNECT forward proxy to 1.1.1.1, like Signal's Giphy proxy [1]? [1] https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
- pcwrt 6y ago
  Totally agree. Just posted my own question here: https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-doh-through-http-proxy/ https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-do...
- geogriffin 6y ago
  Answering my own question.. A cryptographer friend offered an answer to this question: The network operator may be the same as or colluding with the target resolver, defeating the anonymization of the proxy. Once we say we need encryption on the first hop, then I can see the logic in using a stateless protocol instead of TLS for the second hop, to avoid TLS-in-TLS and all the round trips associated with that. Side note: It'd be cool if these new protocols used the more generic Noise Protocol Framework [1] instead of a custom, more specialized protocol they just came up with like HPKE [2]. [1] http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html [2] https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke-06.txt https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke-06.txt
ittan 6y ago
This should be called DOHW, DNS over http made worse.
dylz 6y ago
Are ODOH resolvers by any disjoint partner available yet? The only one I see is the CF-owned and run one.
tie_ 6y ago
No discussion of DNS privacy should go without a link to Bert Hubert's awesome talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjin3nv8jAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjin3nv8jAo
anonypla 6y ago
One should also note that, even if you use ODoH, eSNI and even Tor (or any VPN service), your ISP could still reliably fingerprint your web access activity at the source using deep learning with over 96% accuracy as shown in this study (https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/tor-wf-dl/ https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/tor-wf-dl/). So while ODoH is a good thing (and also recommended in this study which has shown the weaknesses of DoH/DoT https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-3153.pdf https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-3153...) and is very similar to DNS over Tor with a DNS hidden service resolver (which Cloudflare also provides). It won't prevent a skilled and motivated adversary from determining your activity and possibly apply censorship. I would guess that a solution to mitigate these would be to use an hybrid solution of VPN over Tor (or Tor over VPN) while also using DNS over Tor or ODoH and eSNI.
pcwrt 6y ago
Serious question, why do we need ODoH at all? Isn't a plain proxy good enough to achieve this? https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-doh-through-http-proxy/ https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-do...

541 points by websirnik 6y ago

> ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested Who is the proxy here, and who the DNS resolver?

MrStonedOne 6y ago
This is a protocol, not a product. There is no set proxy, or resolver.
new23d 6y ago
From the CloudFlare blog post: > A key component of ODoH is a proxy that is disjoint from the target resolver. Today, we’re launching ODoH with several leading proxy partners, including: PCCW, SURF, and Equinix.

nuker 6y ago

Why not DoT? And DoH is mum on http cookies: "Determining whether or not a DoH implementation requires HTTP cookie support is particularly important because HTTP cookies are the primary state tracking mechanism in HTTP." https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8484 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8484

nalekberov 6y ago

The more these big corporations involves in this process, the more we are gonna lose our privacy. Centralization and too much power in certain amount of hands are the source of all evil.

jamescun 6y ago

Preventing the target resolver from seeing client's IP address breaks GeoDNS. This is already a problem with 1.1.1.1 which doesn't honour the EDNS client subnet extension. Given generally DNS is just the start of an intereaction, usually followed by the connection directly between the client and intended destination, I don't see what kind of snooping these privacy measures are there to prevent.

deleted 6y ago
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ignoramous 6y ago
Valid points, but... > Preventing the target resolver from seeing client's IP address breaks GeoDNS. If the proxy and the target are in the same metro as the user, it shouldn't really matter. > This is already a problem with 1.1.1.1 which doesn't honour the EDNS client subnet extension. 1.1.1.1 runs at Cloudflare's edge. Most likely it is recursing DNS from more or less the same location as the user and so ECS isn't really required when in fact it exposes the client unnecessarily to upstream name-servers. > I don't see what kind of snooping these privacy measures are there to prevent. The one where DNS resolvers build to sell browsing profile of its users?
- snarf21 6y ago
  Aren't these DNS resolvers largely the ISP anyway? They know where any packets are going anyway for each user. Seems to be a trivial hurdle to jump.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_d 6y ago
  > If the proxy and the target are in the same metro as the user, it shouldn't really matter. Having ran one of the largest public DNS resolvers on the internet, I can tell you it is a big problem. GeoIP providers do not have the fine grained data to be able to tell that a resolvers unicast address is in Seattle vs Chicago for example. Cloudflare doesn't care about edns-client-subnet because the only downside is that other CDNs appear slower to their users.
absolutelyrad 6y ago
As I see this, this is a very clever move by Cloudflare. It's intentional to force websites to move to their CDN or atleast use a CDN with anycast and prevent you from making your own CDN like you could cheaply before (spinning up DO droplets and doing loadbalancing with geo DNS).

deleted 6y ago

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TimWolla 6y ago

Probably better source, the blog post at Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344220

aorth 6y ago
Thanks. The original post redirects to: https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_4c6c8655-d917-4ccc-bf76-c5518ee16f50 https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_... Which is blocked at the DNS level on my network.
- jessmay 6y ago
  As it should be.
dang 6y ago
Thanks! we've changed to that from https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-design-a-new-privacy-friendly-internet-protocol/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-desig....

seek3r 6y ago

I’m good with the Apple’s privacy-oriented stance. But I can’t stop to think what will happen when advertisers knock on Apple’s door trying to get their hands on the users’ data that one else can access. Is Apple going to sell it out for more profits?

techelite 6y ago
It's just marketing. Apple has already shown they will sell you out with PRISM. Who knows what other backroom deals are happening outside our knowledge. The only reason we found out about PRISM is because the gigantic scale and Snowden sacrificed Everything to let it be known.
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  One thing I like to remind people of is the fact that the Snowden docs that revealed PRISM were years old at the time of Snowden gathering them, and even older at release... just imagine how much further things have progressed in the 10+ years since. (iirc lots of them had 2007 dates on them)
- saberience 6y ago
  I think there's a big difference between selling data for profit and the government literally forcing you to give up data based on national security laws or else forcing you to close your business. There's almost nothing Apple can do about the latter case (or any other company for that matter).
  - techelite 6y ago
    Didn't twitter survive? Also how would we know if Apple is working with other companies? It's not like they are known to be transparent or Truthful.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago

landerwust 6y ago

Opened this post expecting to be hating on another power grab dressed up as protocol engineering, but this one seems to actively /reduce/ the centralization of user data collection in DoH. Props to Cloudflare, I'm impressed.

syshum 6y ago
I still have doubts, 1.1.1.1 was a clear power grab and effort to control more of the internet. DoH in partnership with Mozilla was an extension of that So I am still suspect of their motives but maybe the negative PR got to be too much
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Avtomatk 6y ago
I would like someone to correct me if I am wrong, but I think we can never have 100% privacy because the destination IPs cannot be encrypted or hidden, so as long as the destination IP can be observed, the server that you are connecting at can be obtained (I know a server can host many web pages, but this requires the port, which cannot be encrypted either). So I don't know to what extent this protocol can be useful.
- sneak 6y ago
  I'm more worried about persistent, authenticated/ID-linked TCP connections (e.g. APNS) providing the client IP over time to an application service provider (e.g. Apple, Slack, Google, Microsoft, et c), that is, city-level geolocation track history via geoip, than I am the ISP or carrier snooping on what websites I connect to. Every iPhone connects to APNS for push notifications and stays connected, and, last I looked at the protocol, the client certificate was linked to the device serial number. That's quite a geoip tracklog dataset, and AFAIK you can't turn it off. It's to the point now that to keep my city-level location private from Apple, I'm not putting SIMs in any of my iPhones/iPads any longer, and carrying a battery powered VPN travel router (with a SIM uplink in it) for them to talk to. Super annoying that it has to come to this.

TimWolla 6y ago

So, having read the blog post from Cloudflare I don't understand why the proxy (needs to terminate|terminates) TLS. I thought HTTPS proxying (or rather: Any TCP protocol) was a solved problem by the HTTP CONNECT verb or SOCKS proxies. What am I missing?

landerwust 6y ago
The user's IP address is masqueraded by the proxy, and neither the DNS mothership (Cloudflare) nor the ISP get to see both who the user is and what they requested. It's an extremely desirable property DoH currently lacks
- TimWolla 6y ago
  Yes, I understand that. But I don't understand what ODoH does better than a run of the mill SOCKS proxy, such as Tor.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - landerwust 6y ago
    Tor is not a run of the mill SOCKS proxy, not least in that it inserts arbitrarily high latency into the user data path. On the other hand, an actual run of the mill SOCKS proxy would have visibility of the user's queries and their identity, defeating the purpose of the design.
    - TimWolla 6y ago
      > an actual run of the mill SOCKS proxy would have visibility of the user's queries and their identity, defeating the purpose of the design. Why would it have visibility of the queries? If I send a TLS connection (containing my DoH query) through that SOCKS proxy, then the SOCKS proxy is unable to decrypt that TLS connection without breaking certificate verification and thus can't read my DoH query.

ignoramous 6y ago

Key bits from the Cloudflare blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ > The target [resolver] sees only the [DNS] query and the proxy’s IP address. The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target. Only the intended target [resolver] can read the content of the [DNS] query and produce a [DNS] response. > The whole process begins with clients that encrypt their query for the target using HPKE. Clients obtain the target’s public key via DNS, where it is bundled into a [SVCB/HTTPS] HTTPS resource record and protected by DNSSEC. > Clients transmit these encrypted queries to a proxy over an HTTPS connection. Upon receipt, the proxy forwards the query to the designated target. The target then decrypts the query, produces a response by sending the query to a recursive resolver such as 1.1.1.1, and then encrypts the response to the client. The encrypted query from the client contains encapsulated keying material from which targets derive the response encryption symmetric key. > ...50% of the time ODoH queries are resolved in fewer than 228ms. BTW, DNSCrypt supports "oblivious" encrypted DNS queries via what it calls Anonymized Relays https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Anonymized-DNS https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Anonymized-D...

landerwust 6y ago
DNSCrypt needs meaningful industry support otherwise it's sadly irrelevant. I think by now we can all agree "industry support" basically means the 3 browser vendors. DoH has at least Mozilla and Google on board, and presumably Microsoft are tailing along.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  > DoH has at least Mozilla and Google on board, and presumably Microsoft are tailing along. Note that DoH (and DoT) shipped in iOS 14 and Big Sur, though aren't particularly easy to enable.
  - xoa 6y ago
    >Note that DoH (and DoT) shipped in iOS 14 and Big Sur, though aren't particularly easy to enable. Specifically, you must install a properly configured .mobileprofile with HTTPS/TLS in the DNSSettings > DNSProtocol part of the payload (along with DNS server addresses of course). Merely pointing at a DoH/DoT supporting DNS server in the settings GUI won't do it, the OS doesn't do any probing and automatically use it just because it's available. For applications DNS Settings is covered under the Network Extension framework [0]. It's definitely nice Apple now has this built-in, and since they're onboard with Cloudflare/Fastly maybe this new twist will be pretty fast too. But obviously they're going to have to make this more automated for it to really make a widespread difference, ideally it'd simply see if the supplied DNS server (manual or DHCP) could run DoH/DoT and then just use it by default with no interaction required. ---- 0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/dns_settings https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/d...

techelite 6y ago

I urge people to stop repeating Apple Advertising. Claims of privacy and security are debunked weekly. You put yourself at risk if you believe it.

xondono 6y ago
Debunked where? If they were I’d expect HN to be the first to publish
- techelite 6y ago
  Yes, they are here every week. There are soooooo many examples. You want iphone security? Google iphone security. Hit news. You want Apple privacy? Google, Apple privacy. Hit news. This isn't obscure at all. It's a weekly event.
selykg 6y ago
Do you have actual proof of this or are you just going to make misleading claims yourself?
- nalekberov 6y ago
  Privacy is a buzzword to boost sales even more. Perhaps the biggest problem with Apple is its nasty monopoly strategies, remember the times you could easily add more RAM, change batteries?
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    This buzzword is actually useful though. It gave us ESNI, Cambridge Analytica, antimonopoly memes and whatnot.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
Your statement is 100% correct but misses the entire point https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-100-correct-but.html?m=1 https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-10...

londons_explore 6y ago

When you need a log-log plot to make the performance degradation not look so severe, you have issues...

3r8riacz 6y ago
145 ms response time when DNScrypt is around 10-25 ms, and anonimized DNScrypt is around 2-3x, wow

theamk 6y ago

This seems to require DNSSEC as a key function. @tptacek ?

tptacek 6y ago
It has nothing to do with DNSSEC.
- theamk 6y ago
  Huh? They say this: > The whole process begins with clients that encrypt their query for the target using HPKE. Clients obtain the target’s public key via DNS, where it is bundled into a HTTPS resource record and protected by DNSSEC. When the TTL for this key expires, clients request a new copy of the key as needed (just as they would for an A/AAAA record when that record’s TTL expires). The usage of a target’s DNSSEC-validated public key guarantees that only the intended target can decrypt the query and encrypt a response (answer). So this looks like relies on DNSSEC as a core part of its security, and that any resolvers willing to participate in this protocol would have to set up one.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Thank you for the part regarding DNSSEC--I was just about to post the same thing.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Oh, gross! I missed that; I read the TechCrunch article and thought I understand what they were going for. Thanks for the correction. That's disgusting.

cblconfederate 6y ago

> Sullivan said a few partner organizations are already running proxies, allowing for early adopters to begin using the technology through Cloudflare’s existing 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. In other words, in order to thwart efforts to make the internet anonymous , US companies are planning to takeover DNS for the vast majority of people.

jgrahamc 6y ago
Oh, please. ODoH is a proposed standard. Use whatever the hell proxy/resolver you feel like, wherever you like. DNS is a shit show of unencrypted data flying around being scooped up by God-knows-who and along comes someone proposing a standard to fix said shit show and this is the response people get.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Decentralized spying > centralized spying
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Choosing to have google or quad9 spy on you doesn't mean AT&T no longer gets your DNS data when you use plain port 53.
- corford 6y ago
  Would have been a million times better if cloudflare had used it's considerable clout and resources to push/lobby for widescale DoT adoption rather than this fucking Frankenstein shit show that is DoH (now with even more garbage attached to it in the form of a proxy)

izacus 6y ago

So Google got sued by ISPs which lobbied an investigation by DOJ for trying to encrypt DNS: https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-29-congress-doj-scrutinze-google-encrypted-dns.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-29-congress-doj-scrutinze-g... Will ISPs be too scared to sue Apple and Cloudflare for this? Or are they giving them an out?

floo 6y ago
If I understand this correctly this was mostly about Google getting an unfair advantage over the ISPs. Which wouldn't be the case if everyone loses access to the IP + DNS request info.

MrStonedOne 6y ago

So I do wonder how such systems can be designed or implemented such that geoip systems can still work. While I'm sure aws route53 and cloudflare's own routing systems can handle this properly, Cloud isn't quite the answer. Not every workload fits on the cloud (see: Discord, which runs on leased servers), and a system that breaks down if your rented datacenters aren't in alignment with Cloud operating regions doesn't make a great solution.

notamy 6y ago
> Not every workload fits on the cloud (see: Discord, which runs on leased servers) As far as I'm aware (don't work there), only bandwidth/CPU-heavy stuff like voice and video live on rented dedis; the core chat services live in GCP.
dylz 6y ago
Discord already doesn't need geoip, since they just direct you at wherever the server location (that you chose) is

teddyh 6y ago

Sounds promising. Get back to me when it’s gotten to the RFC stage. A ready-made solution thrown over the wall like this, is rarely what is ultimately adopted.

freebuju 6y ago

Misleading title. Apple devices are not anywhere near ready to utilize this dns protocol. Apart from that, yeah let's shift our dns trust to one of the biggest data resolvers! The irony... Encrypted dns might be already in use by government or military agencies, but they know too well the effects of cascading this tech down to the masses. They will never let this reach the public.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alwillis 6y ago
Apple devices are not anywhere near ready to utilize this dns protocol. The latest versions of macOS and iOS already support DoH and DoT; Apple could push an update tomorrow to enable ODoH tomorrow if they wanted to. Encrypted dns might be already in use by government or military agencies, but they know too well the effects of cascading this tech down to the masses. They will never let this reach the public. You do know we've had encrypted DNS for years, right? It has some issues, which this new protocol is designed to address. There's no reason to believe "they" can or will intervene to stop ODoH.
- freebuju 6y ago
  I don't think you understand how DNS works. DoT and DoH should not be confused for encrypted DNS. Encrypted dns is still a myth to most users. Major resolvers do not support it since it directly conflicts with with their data collection business. All forms of Internet communications can be largely encrypted. Dns is the last frontier remaining. It remains so for good reason...
  - alwillis 6y ago
    I don't think you understand how DNS works. I don't think you're in a position to comment on what I do or don't know about DNS. Encrypted dns is still a myth to most users. Major resolvers do not support it since it directly conflicts with with their data collection business. Except those users using Firefox or Chrome, which come with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) preconfigured. Or those who've been running DoT on their home networks, which I setup quite a while ago now. From the Wikipedia article on DoH, emphasis mine: "A goal of the method is to increase user privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle attacks[1] by using the HTTPS protocol to encrypt the data between the DoH client and the DoH-based DNS resolver. DNS over TLS (DoT) RFC: "This document describes the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide privacy for DNS. Encryption provided by TLS eliminates opportunities for eavesdropping and on-path tampering with DNS queries in the network, such as discussed in RFC 7626." The lack of DNS encryption isn't what Apple and Cloudflare are addressing; it's that whoever runs the DNS resolver can still see the websites you're visiting and ODoH fixes that.

darkwater 6y ago

Until we get rid of SNI[1] in HTTPS for good there will still be providers (like my ISP) that do deep packet inspection on SNI and kill the connection right away if you happen to visit a forbidden site (and this was western Europe, yesterday, on a site behind CloudFlare) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

jgrahamc 6y ago
About getting rid of SNI... https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/ Been working on that also.
- darkwater 6y ago
  I wanted to link CF efforts on this also but somehow I forgot. Thanks for sharing and I really hope you are successful at this because what I experienced yesterday was really infuriating. Even if having everything behind a CDN to avoid ISP spying is still not the optimal solution, but at least is an improvement given what ISPs have already shown.
ignoramous 6y ago
You can bypass SNI inspection [0] with tools like GreenTunnel [1] and Intra [2]. [0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22654737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22654737 [2] https://getintra.org/ https://getintra.org/
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  I can't find any source on intra working to prevent SNI sniffing. The page itself only mentions DNS, and Googling doesn't reveal any other source for that. E: NVM, found it. It does like it uses split hellos.
  - deleted 6y ago

clashmeifyoucan 6y ago

I'm wondering how they still get good performance with a proxy server in between, the plots seem quite close to each other (maybe because logarithmic?). Also, not sure how useful the Tor comparison is, since Tor does 3 hops as opposed to their 1 so it would be a shame if it doesn't beat that.

jaimex2 6y ago

Whats the point? Governments subpoena the information or just block the protocol outright. ( or in China, get it delivered to their door by Apple ) Commercial parties have a bag full of tricks from fingerprinting to embeds on the page itself to track you. Privacy seeking users are already tunneling their traffic. That leaves script kiddies at Internet cafes. TLS kind of fixed that already so... Good work?

MrStonedOne 6y ago
As it stated in the article, ISPs tracking and selling the data. Exactly that, no more, no less.
alecco 6y ago
You, the proxy, and the DNS service, can be in 3 different countries. It's not bullet proof but makes it quite hard for a single government. Unless you are a Bond villain I think this is more than you need. If you need more than that use ToR or similar.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  While I agree that it's a step forward you should proxy your whole traffic anyways if you want to enjoy the benefits of encrypted DNS. Otherwise intermediaries routing your packets can still see what you connect to by looking at the IP header (or SNI, if not encrypted). DoH/DoT is still useful because it allows you to proxy your DNS over Tor (for example) without having to worry about tampering (or surveillance if you also use separate circuits per domain).

crumbshot 6y ago

This is a neat design, but, does this not just shift the issue of trust as to whether the proxy and the target are colluding: > However, each of these guarantees relies on one fundamental property — that the proxy and the target servers do not collude. So long as there is no collusion, an attacker succeeds only if both the proxy and target are compromised. I'm not sure how an end user would be expected to assess this any more than they could ascertain whether any particular DoH/DoT provider is as trustworthy as they claim.

wp381640 6y ago
Add a few more proxy hops and you’ve effectively reinvented Tor
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  reinvented Tor, but with extra steps and less security
  - asutekku 6y ago
    But probably faster.
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      Yes, just like a proxy or a VPN. Faster - but it does not solve the problem.
- theamk 6y ago
  .. but the version of Tor which does not raise alarms on every corporate firewall/IDS system
diegocg 6y ago
Well, this could probably encourage the creation of privacy-oriented proxys (they just have to forward queries, so it should be relatively inexpensive compared to a full DNS server). What is the likehood of someone getting logs from Cloudflare (who promises it does not keep logs, but let's assume it does) and at the same time hacks into some random privay-oriented organization? Of course, one might imagine a State actor using all their resources to do just that. But this would be a very complex attack. At least, it would stop all kind of ad tracking. The worst part of this proposal is that it will further centralize the DNS infrastructure.

thrwaway2020aug 6y ago

I'm surprised to see Cloudflare and Apple collaborating on privacy. What does Cloudflare think of Safari's new CNAME-cloaking detection to block cookies? https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-tracking-defense/ https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac... The reason I ask is because Cloudflare's "orange cloud" DNS mitigates that protection because it prevents Safari from detecting the cloak. On the other hand, I haven't run into many engineers who think CNAME-cloaking actually hurts privacy in light of Safari's other efforts to partition local storage. Does Cloudflare think it would be help privacy for Apple to know the final IPs behind orange cloud DNS?

gwbas1c 6y ago

I suspect that practical matters will interfere with widespread adoption of encrypted DNS. In my state, Comcast is going to start charging heavy bandwidth users extra. After a few people get surprise bills, I suspect that lawmakers will require that internet providers break down a bill by application.

joshspankit 6y ago
After seeing similar things throughout the years, I feel like that is very doubtful. When tested, the push for privacy is much stronger than the push for cost.
api 6y ago
I’d just get Starlink. Even if the deal was worse in terms of cost it would be a way to say fuck you to the ISP. Without some way to do that ISPs will not be able to get away with such customer hostile behavior.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Without some way to do that ISPs will not be able to get away with such customer hostile behavior. I guess it won't take long until the first community or HOA decides to ban Starlink dish installations for faked "optical nuisance" issues.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    The fcc will have something to say about that. They've already banned rules against antennas and sat dishes for TV.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Faked? What other reason would an HOA have to ban them?
    - supertrope 6y ago
      A cable company offers to wire the neighborhood saving the builder some money. In exchange the HOA setup by the builder bans satellite dishes. In more annoying cases the HOA negotiates a group plan included in your HOA assessment bill; that really stifles competition because paying for an alternative on top of cable is irrational. The FCC banned satellite dish bans back in the 90s. Apartment building operators still do this scam. The incumbent cable company will share revenue in exchange for the landlord refusing any competitor wiring. Rent seeking in ISP markets is peanuts compared with zoning though. If real estate was much less supply constrained landlords would never fathom annoying a customer with inferior utilities.

joshspankit 6y ago

I understand why Cloudflare wants this (marketing, as well as being able to serve their customer’s content through restrictions, thus making them more valuable to those customers), but why does Apple want this? My knee-jerk is that they want to further hide/make unstoppable things like the Gatekeeper network checks, but there has to be more right?

PartiallyTyped 6y ago
It is part of their marketing. The fact that others sell or actively use your data, e.g. google, facebook, microsoft, apple was handed the opportunity to charge a premium for the absence of such tracking and data usage. If you watch the presentations, they branded/poised themselves as the privacy centric approach.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  I see your point about how they (will) position it, but I’m still curious about their actual motives.
  - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    Exactly that. It strengthens their image amidst the whole ordeal with app signatures. It is equivalent to investing for an ad.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    As a preface, I am about to describe something I personally view as absolutely horrific. Please, dear reader, in no way interpret these comments as approving. Privacy is a luxury. It's something rich people buy and poor people can't afford to concern themselves with. Apple sells a luxury product, and has no particular stake in invading customer privacy at the moment (iAd was never successful enough to change that). So they add a feature to their status symbol to address the concerns of their customer base and work with a partner company that can actually deploy it.
simonh 6y ago

cannabis_sam 6y ago

Has Google produced any similar initiatives?

ksm1717 6y ago

Interesting that apple is increasing its stake in privacy. On all their billboards and advertisements of course they like to present it as a boon to the customer. More importantly, I think it’s a negative for personal data hungry competitors while being relatively unrelated to Apples business

atonse 6y ago
Yup I just see this as an alignment of interests. In this case, Apple's interest happens to align with that of their consumers. And I for one am happy that they have taken up this cause and put their weight behind it, whatever their intentions may be, the effect is that it makes the web more private for those of us who deem it important to move away from the "monetizing data" cancer that has spread all over the internet.
- andiareso 6y ago
  This seems suspicious to me. Apple does most if not all ML/data-mining on the device where-as competitors do it in the cloud. My assumption is they are positioning themselves this way to grab consumers later should regulations hit cloud services collecting data externally. Apple can say it is all on device and don't have access while other companies will have to say they have your data. Ultimately the motives are the same.

John_Westra 6y ago

I would love to see Firefox be an early adopter of this, regain market share and save us all from Chrome!

akvadrako 6y ago

If anyone wants the draft RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pauly-dprive-oblivious-doh-03 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pauly-dprive-oblivious-doh...

throwaway54235 6y ago

REMINDER: Research proves that it's easy to correlate IP addresses in HTTP[S] connections with the domain you are connecting to with a very high success rate. You can resolve the websites from the Alexa top 100k list and create a ipaddr -> website map that will successfully apply to 90% of Internet traffic without ambiguity. A lot of research papers also show how easy it is to fingerprint and detect a TLS handshake. Assuming the SNI problem is going to be solved, the other problems are still here. TL;DR: use Tor.

mlegner 6y ago

The basic idea makes sense to me and it's great to see efforts to improve DNS privacy. However, I'm not really convinced by Cloudflare's analysis of the processing overhead: The blog post only discusses how the proxying and encryption affect latency but not the processing at the server. In contrast to plain DoH (or DoT), where only symmetric cryptography is used after the first set-up, ODoH requires asymmetric cryptography (which is several orders of magnitude slower) for each individual request. The "less than 1ms" that they claim for the 99th percentile is no problem for the client but it is a problem for the resolver. Asymmetric cryptography is also used for verifying DNSSEC responses, but this is only necessary for records that are not cached. On the other hand, an ODoH resolver may require to set up and keep track of a lower number of TLS connections as the number of proxies is likely smaller than the number of clients.

TrueDuality 6y ago

The biggest and most consistent downside I see with these DNS enhancements is that it prevents filtering at the network level. Querying nameservers is being pushed into applications themselves to support these new features (such as Chrome and Firefox), which bypasses any system resolvers configured on the host. In most cases there is no way to signal from the network that it is not desirable to do this (Firefox being the sole exception). There also is no good way for enterprises to centrally manage these settings. DNS is a major source of information when doing threat hunting on a network and having that go dark is a big problem. Enterprises aside, there has been a rise of people using solutions like pi-hole in their home networks to filter out traffic not just for ads, but known malicious domains, and telemetry trackers (which Apple does get filtered by, only calling them out specifically because they have an active interest in not being filtered like this). Yes I think it's also a problem that ISPs are snooping and selling this information, but I think that is a less severe problem than rampant malware infections and the excessive collection of online usage data in the telemetry systems present in every webapp, OS, mobile, or IoT device. This increases privacy in one place, while making it much harder to actively protect yourself from the more aggressive and invasive sources of data collection.

hkt 6y ago
Applications still have fallback though, right? If so, I foresee blocks on DoH/etc to common resolvers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1. I'll be blocking them at home on the assumption that I only want regular DNS lookups so I can point them to my own DNS server etc.
- 0x426577617265 6y ago
  Blocking traffic for known DoH services would be trivial. How about blocking unknown, how would you block that?
  - dhaavi 6y ago
    Think out of the box: Just don't let the app connect to an IP it has not resolved a domain name for. That's what we can do with the Portmaster (https://github.com/safing/portmaster https://github.com/safing/portmaster). Check it out!

elliottinvent 6y ago

> Cloudflare is committed to end-user privacy. Pretty crucial hyphen

karmakaze 6y ago

In a nutshell: client encrypts to proxy, which decrypts & removes client info, then asks resolver. > “What ODoH is meant to do is separate the information about who is making the query and what the query is,” said Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare’s head of research. > In other words, ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested. Sullivan said that page loading times on ODoH are “practically indistinguishable” from DoH and shouldn’t cause any significant changes to browsing speed.

nathcd 6y ago
> client encrypts to proxy, which decrypts & removes client info This is incorrect; the proxy doesn't decrypt. It just proxies. From https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/ : > The target decrypts queries encrypted by the client, via a proxy. Similarly, the target encrypts responses and returns them to the proxy. [...] The proxy does as a proxy is supposed to do, in that it forwards messages between client and target.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. So client encrypts for the resolver and sends an opaque payload to the proxy.

g42gregory 6y ago

Do I understand this correctly that if DoH is implemented, none of the firewalls will be able to block the web sites? Including the pi-hole firewalls, as an example. If that's the case, this situation can't stand for long. Does this meant that the DoH would need to be extended to allow firewalls to decrypt it? If not, here is a PaloAlto Networks blog advertising capability to block all DoH traffic, presumably at work [0]. It looks like you might not be able to use DoH at work, the way it currently stands. I wonder what would be the right solution? [0] https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/blogs/protecting-organizations-in-a-world-of-doh-and-dot/ba-p/313171 https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/blogs/protecting-organi...

DoctorOW 6y ago
What's stopping your PiHole from just getting its own HTTPS cert?
- g42gregory 6y ago
  I am still a noob to the networking. I just started using OpenWrt router to manage my home network. OpenWrt has an option to enable DNS over HTTPS. Is this all one would need to do in order for the firewall rules still work with the DoH browsers?
1over137 6y ago
>Do I understand this correctly that if... You understand correctly. DoH mostly defeats pihole and the like. Presumably Google and other ad companies love this.
jeroenhd 6y ago
DoH isn't blocking anything that any existing application can already bypass. It merely points out the fact that the rise in encryption makes it difficult for third parties to administer the software running your device. DoH will not be extended to allow firewalls to decrypt it. The entire point of DoH is that firewalls cannot do that. It's not hard for an administrator to set up their own DoH server, though, so there is no need as long as that server can be configured at the network level. This is currently possible through group policies on Windows and most MDM applications on mobile devices. The nice thing about encryption is that only the software and the server know what is being exchanged. The not-so-nice thing about encryption is that only the software and the server know what is being exchanged. You already can't see the difference between your computer connecting to some S3 bucket to download a picture of a cat or malware connecting to a S3 bucket to get a list of IP addresses mapped to host names. It's possible to run fully-fledged VPNs that look exactly like normal HTTPS traffic on the network level. DoH changes nothing about that. On enterprise networks, IT administrators can already put measures into place that prevent DoH on support applications and restrict HTTPS connections to trusted hosts (through SNI sniffing + validating the connection). The upcoming encrypted SNI will make this harder, but group policy will be able to disable eSNI on any trusted computers and browsers, leading only untrusted software to be unverifiable, which can then be reasonably classified as malicious. If IT administrators cannot put measures on employees' devices then... well, they've already lost. Before DoH, they just didn't know that they'd lost yet. Palo Alto currently blocks DoH by decrypting all TLS traffic (ranging from cookie recipes to naked pictures your phone is syncing to the cloud) with a man-in-the-middle attack which requires their certificate authority to be installed on your system. They filter out the DNS requests inside those TLS streams and apply some kind of rule to them. Right now, they can either block the requests or change the contents (as long as the website and/or client doesn't use DNSSEC). With ODoH, changing the contents will no longer be practical, but blocking the connection will be. Together with decent group policy settings, networks with such a setup should be as safe as they were without ODoH. On a side note: these types of middleboxes are often trying to be transparent and silently violate many standards, breaking stuff that works on every normal network. Stuff like these firewalls are the reason that TLS 1.3 is pretending to be a special type of TLS 1.2 every time it connects, because otherwise some big middlebox vendors' platforms freak out and kill the connection. I doubt the inevitable transition towards HTTP/3 or even HTTP/4 will do these boxes much good. I don't put a lot of faith in devices like this.

CyberRabbi 6y ago

All security theatre while SNI is still universally deployed. Even then most IP blocks are static and easily correlated to source site. A tor-like solution is the only real solution for this threat model

eh78ssxv2f 6y ago

What a stark difference between Google and Apple/Cloudflare. Apple/Cloudflare are working on privacy-friendly protocols that reduce the amount of information exposed to them. At exactly the same time, Google is working on proxying browser traffic through them without any consents [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337995

PikachuEXE 6y ago
I guess all the user "consent" for Google proxying (spying) users are included in the ocean of ToC text Thus I am using Google Chrome only for Web Dev

benlivengood 6y ago

Metadata privacy is very hard to solve and traffic analysis of non-Tor traffic is pretty accurate, which is also applicable to CDN traffic regardless of how well DNS is protected. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1158/paper2.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1158/paper2.pdf

ajnin 6y ago

At what point should we just throw out IP out of the window and figure out something new ? OK maybe not IP since all hardware infrastructure is based on it, but the whole idea of associating services to publicly open ports on the target machine. I'm thinking connections should be encrypted at the operating system level and then services would plug in at some higher level in a way that cannot be detected by outside observers.

zero_deg_kevin 6y ago

No hubris here at all. But seriously, fuck this protocol and fuck every other BigCorp-sponsored protocol to remake the Internet. We the People Who Implement Protocols are too busy keeping the lights on to chase incremental, nice-to-have improvements.

judge2020 6y ago
Would you believe that HTTP/1.1 was made by people from Microsoft, Xerox, and Compaq with the sole purpose of being a nice-to-have improvement over an existing widely-used protocol, HTTP/1.0? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

phlhar 6y ago

The title of the article is really misleading. I though of a succesor to IPv6 and not DNS. It shouldn't say "internet protocol", thats technically not correct

Lammy 6y ago

It bothers me how "privacy" has been redefined in recent years to mean "encrypted" and not "surveillance-resistant". We keep building things that make more requests I can't terminate locally, e.g. to a PiHole. Never forget the lesson in "Using Metadata to find Paul Revere": https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Kalium 6y ago
As another HN user put it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349426 > Administering devices with network settings is convenient, but rapidly vanishing because there's no technical difference between you administering your local network and a totalitarian ISP administering their users. Your ability to terminate things locally means that finding Paul Revere with metadata isn't needed. It's a lot of work when you can just directly look at all your country's traffic.
- hkt 6y ago
  People in totalitarian regimes aren't safe. This is kind of a given. What everyone everywhere can resist, though, is corporate surveillance. That's the aim people should have.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    You're absolutely right. Corporate surveillance can, should, and must be resisted. It is perhaps worth considering carefully if exposing most people to surveillance they are not equipped to defend against from lots of entities (such as with typical DNS) is an improvement over something like Oblivious DoH. It might even offer some protection against some totalitarian governments in some cases. Again, you're completely right. Protecting people from corporate surveillance is very important! I just think it might be worth considering that we don't have a perfect answer at the moment, and some subtlety in how we think about this might be in order.
  - core-questions 6y ago

jlgaddis 6y ago

Even better, IMO, would be if all targets were also proxies and a client could choose -- at "query time" -- any combination of (proxy, target) that they prefer. If you wanted to go a step further, you can even allow "chaining" of proxies, such that the path a query takes might be, in an extreme example, similar to how Tor operates: Client -> Proxy 1 -> Proxy 2 -> Proxy 3 -> Target -> Resolver -- Anyways, this is kinda sorta interesting, I guess, but honestly I'm more excited by and looking forward to the (hopefully!) eventual adoption and roll-out of "DNS SVCB and HTTPS RRs" [0] -- one of the other I-Ds (linked in the OP) on which ODoH is built -- and I suspect many other HN'ers will be as well (although I'd happily settle for SRV RR support in browsers). -- [0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https-02 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https-02

vanshg 6y ago
Sounds like Tor/Onion Routing?

dang 6y ago

All: We changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-design-a-new-privacy-friendly-internet-protocol/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/cloudflare-and-apple-desig... to the more detailed source, but you might want to read both.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

OJFord 6y ago

What's the advantage of this over specifying a DoH provider (as we do today with plain DNS)? Unfortunately I suppose the only way to really do that is with a resolv file (adlist/blocklist) of DoH hosts (which exist) but instead of pointing to 0.0.0.0, point to <preferred DoH>. Edit - d'oh! I see it now - that would mean DoH provider knows query and IP, whereas here the ODoH proxy knows your IP but not the query. Nice.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

Is it not still possible to do a pi-hole kind of setup for DoH or ODoH? All you have to do is setup the server as a proxy for all http(s) connections on top of DNS connections and trust its cert on the client. If we can reliably block all ad networks with uBlock origin, picking out DNS requests from other http requests should be even simpler, right?

aftbit 6y ago

Can the proxies be (ab)used to proxy arbitrary HTTPS traffic?

hkt 6y ago

DNS privacy for DoH effectively means we all lose the ability to control what our devices are connecting to. In particular, we can't block ads and trackers at the network level. The lack of fallback to regular DNS in the spec means we will choose between devices that track us while they work, or devices that are broken.

exabrial 6y ago

Hilariously I see privacy invading advertisers loving this. No more DNS blocking ad traffic! And since it's only a matter of time before Apple removes root access on their PCs, it puts them in complete control off what you see.

geogriffin 6y ago

Why encrypt the first hop? Why isn't this just plain DoH with a simple CONNECT forward proxy to 1.1.1.1, like Signal's Giphy proxy [1]? [1] https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/

pcwrt 6y ago
Totally agree. Just posted my own question here: https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-doh-through-http-proxy/ https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-do...
geogriffin 6y ago
Answering my own question.. A cryptographer friend offered an answer to this question: The network operator may be the same as or colluding with the target resolver, defeating the anonymization of the proxy. Once we say we need encryption on the first hop, then I can see the logic in using a stateless protocol instead of TLS for the second hop, to avoid TLS-in-TLS and all the round trips associated with that. Side note: It'd be cool if these new protocols used the more generic Noise Protocol Framework [1] instead of a custom, more specialized protocol they just came up with like HPKE [2]. [1] http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html [2] https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke-06.txt https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke-06.txt

ittan 6y ago

This should be called DOHW, DNS over http made worse.

dylz 6y ago

Are ODOH resolvers by any disjoint partner available yet? The only one I see is the CF-owned and run one.

tie_ 6y ago

No discussion of DNS privacy should go without a link to Bert Hubert's awesome talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjin3nv8jAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjin3nv8jAo

anonypla 6y ago

One should also note that, even if you use ODoH, eSNI and even Tor (or any VPN service), your ISP could still reliably fingerprint your web access activity at the source using deep learning with over 96% accuracy as shown in this study (https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/tor-wf-dl/ https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/tor-wf-dl/). So while ODoH is a good thing (and also recommended in this study which has shown the weaknesses of DoH/DoT https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-3153.pdf https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-3153...) and is very similar to DNS over Tor with a DNS hidden service resolver (which Cloudflare also provides). It won't prevent a skilled and motivated adversary from determining your activity and possibly apply censorship. I would guess that a solution to mitigate these would be to use an hybrid solution of VPN over Tor (or Tor over VPN) while also using DNS over Tor or ODoH and eSNI.

pcwrt 6y ago

Serious question, why do we need ODoH at all? Isn't a plain proxy good enough to achieve this? https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-doh-through-http-proxy/ https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/12/oblivious-dns-over-https-vs-do...