Cloudflare and Apple design a new privacy-friendly internet protocol

guest · Dec 8, 2020

Cloudflare and Apple design a new privacy-friendly internet protocol
December 8, 2020
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/c...ign-a-new-privacy-friendly-internet-protocol/

Engineers at Cloudflare and Apple say they’ve developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.
But first, a little bit about how the internet works. [...]

Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.

“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.
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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.
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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.

But most will have to wait until ODoH is baked into browsers and operating systems before it can be used. That could take months or years, depending on how long it takes for ODoH to be certified as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
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Cloudflare: Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1

Today we are announcing support for a new proposed DNS standard — co-authored by engineers from Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly — that separates IP addresses from queries, so that no single entity can see both at the same time. Even better, we’ve made source code available, so anyone can try out ODoH, or run their own ODoH service!
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trott3r · Dec 8, 2020

Interesting I wonder if pihole will use it.

guest · Dec 9, 2020

Oblivious DNS standard promises improved privacy
December 9, 2020
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/12/09/oblivious-dns-standard-promises-improved-privacy/

Oblivious DNS is a new proposed DNS standard that has been co-authored by engineers from Apple, Fastly and Cloudflare to improve privacy during DNS operations.

Basically, what ODoH does is add a proxy to the requests that sits between the client device and the DNS provider.
Traffic flows through the proxy and that results in improved privacy.

The DNS provider communicates only with the Proxy and not the client. In other words, the DNS provider sees the proxy IP but not the IP of the user device.

The Proxy sees the user IP as it communicates directly with it, but it has no information on the DNS request as it is encrypted.

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The research paper Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH): A Practical Privacy Enhancement to DNS provides additional details.
Closing Words
Oblivious DNS separates a device's IP address from its DNS queries. That is a good thing as it prevents that DNS providers link IP addresses to DNS queries.
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arXiv: Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH): A Practical Privacy Enhancement to DNS

However, one of the criticisms of DoT and DoH is brought to bear by the small number of large-scale deployments (e.g., Comcast, Google, Cloudflare): DNS resolvers can associate query contents with client identities in the form of IP addresses.
Oblivious DNS over HTTPS(ODoH) safeguards against this problem.
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(PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.10121

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