[HN Gopher] Mozilla rolls out DoH to Canadian users of Firefox
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mozilla rolls out DoH to Canadian users of Firefox
        
       Author : tristor
       Score  : 163 points
       Date   : 2021-07-08 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
        
       | protomyth wrote:
       | Is there an open source DoH resolver?
        
         | tristor wrote:
         | Unbound supports DoH since 1.12.0 released in 2020. [1]
         | 
         | [1]: https://blog.apnic.net/2020/12/14/dns-over-https-in-
         | unbound/
        
           | protomyth wrote:
           | Anyone know if NSD or Bind is going that way?
        
       | betaby wrote:
       | Mozilla is literally switching Canadian users to use government's
       | (CIRA) DNS by default. Seriously, how that's a good thing?
        
         | _verandaguy wrote:
         | It's not quite that clear cut. CIRA is strictly speaking a
         | public, not-for-profit company, but the DNS servers were built
         | and maintained by CSE (our NSA) for the malicious domain
         | filtering/reporting aspect, the Centre for Cybersecurity
         | (another public service arm mandated with building out our
         | domestic cybersecurity infrastructure), and Shared Services,
         | the federal government's infrastructure backbone.
         | 
         | I know many people will stop reading at CSE and draw their own
         | conclusions, but like with every issue there's nuance here. CSE
         | arguably draws some of the foremost information security
         | experts in the country, and their mandate does also include
         | protecting the digital security of Canadians. I'm going to be
         | cautiously optimistic and start looking for transparency
         | resources around Canadian Shield.
        
           | Sunspark wrote:
           | Misleading. "CIRA is providing the threat blocking technology
           | while the CSE's Canadian Centre for Cyber Security is
           | offering its threat intelligence services -- basically a
           | who's-who list of every bad actor roaming the web."
           | 
           | CIRA has 3 levels much like opendns, private, protected and
           | family. My router has already been using private for awhile
           | mainly because it was the fastest dns.
           | 
           | The server for where I am located is hosted at a local ISP.
           | If they were truly nefarious vacuuming up every dns request
           | and providing a printout of my activity to the prime minister
           | every morning they'd just host the server on their own
           | network.
           | 
           | If CSE built it themselves as alleged, they did a good job in
           | terms of its performance and I trust the Canadian government
           | more than I trust an ad company.
        
             | betaby wrote:
             | Good for your. Canadian government did a great job with the
             | recent CRTC decisions, right?
        
               | Sunspark wrote:
               | Don't try to muddy the waters by conflating the
               | regulatory board's pricing decision with nefarious spooks
               | searching for Newfoundland independence videos in my
               | history.
        
               | betaby wrote:
               | CRTC explicitly asked to evaluate CIRA DNS as a potential
               | way to block content for Canadians
               | https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2021/2021-9.htm
        
               | Sunspark wrote:
               | "15. While network-level blocking can be implemented
               | without accessing the content of Internet transmissions,
               | the Commission nevertheless considers that any regulatory
               | framework for blocking or filtering traffic must include
               | safeguards to ensure user interests are protected. Any
               | framework the Commission approves will need to include,
               | at a minimum, provisions that (i) ensure Internet
               | subscriber privacy, (ii) enable subscribers to opt into
               | or out of blocking, (iii) provide a false-positive
               | correction mechanism, (iv) ensure blocking decisions are
               | unbiased and made in the best interest of Canadians, and
               | (v) minimize subscriber information monitoring,
               | collection, and usage."
               | 
               | In case of emergency, break glass and use VPN.
        
             | _verandaguy wrote:
             | Good callout, thanks for the correction.
        
             | ryan29 wrote:
             | > I trust the Canadian government more than I trust an ad
             | company.
             | 
             | Me too. However, since it's sort of the government running
             | it, I wonder if they could ever implement ad blocking
             | without getting sued by the ad companies.
        
         | tristor wrote:
         | Every member of the Mozilla TRR program has to abide by the TRR
         | resolver policies, undergo regular audits to ensure compliance,
         | publicly commit to these policies in their own privacy policy,
         | and publish annual transparency reports. CIRA meets these
         | requirements, which provide assurance that they are treating
         | user data with respect. See
         | https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy for more
         | information.
        
         | dubcanada wrote:
         | First of all, CIRA is not the government, it is an elected
         | public company.
         | 
         | Second of all, it is not switching to use CIRA's DNS, it is
         | added CIRA DNS to their revolver so .ca domains get fed through
         | Mozilla's DNS over HTTP, rather then going Mozilla DNS <->
         | CIRA.
        
           | betaby wrote:
           | No? What does it even mean 'added CIRA DNS to their revolver
           | so .ca domains get fed through Mozilla's DNS over HTTP'.
           | Please explain in technical terms.
        
             | dubcanada wrote:
             | CIRA is a root domain company (like Verisign for .com), it
             | has root records because it owns the root nameservers for
             | all .ca domains. All they are doing is adding those to
             | Mozilla's existing supply (Cloudflare provides other DNS
             | records). So rather then going Mozilla -> Cloudflare ->
             | CIRA and back, it now just goes Mozilla -> CIRA. I don't
             | have time to explain how DNS works. Look up Mozilla's
             | Trusted Recursive Resolver and how it works.
        
               | betaby wrote:
               | No. Mozilla changes is about recursor, not '.ca' domain.
        
         | UseStrict wrote:
         | CIRA isn't government owned or backed, it's a member-directed
         | not-for-profit organization. The government doesn't have
         | anything beyond a non-voting board seat.
        
       | uniqueuid wrote:
       | Chris Siebenmann has written extensively and early on what this
       | means for organizations:
       | 
       | https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxDNSOverH...
        
         | fulafel wrote:
         | I wonder what's the attraction of split horizon dns especially
         | at an academic institution. It seems it will obviously break
         | stuff since all kinds of things rely on dns working as it was
         | designed to, providing a global namespace.
        
           | ryan29 wrote:
           | I personally use split horizon DNS for my home lab. I have
           | several things that I put behind Cloudflare, but I don't want
           | my local access to go me > cloudflare > me, so I use split
           | horizon DNS. If you're not behind something like Cloudflare
           | you can use NAT reflection (hairpin NAT), but those are a bit
           | of a hack.
           | 
           | Canada also has some large, private networks used by
           | provincial governments that use split horizon DNS and DoH is
           | going to be a huge pain for them. One specific example would
           | be libraries that are on a private network and have access to
           | resources handled differently depending on how you connect;
           | via the private network = no auth, but via the internet =
           | auth required.
           | 
           | Split horizon DNS is a simple, practical way of affecting how
           | traffic is routed in a lot of cases.
        
           | uniqueuid wrote:
           | > Fortunately we already have a split-horizon DNS setup,
           | because we long ago made the decision to have a private top
           | level domain for all of our sandbox networks, so we use our
           | existing DNS infrastructure to give BINAT'd machines
           | different IP addresses in the internal and external views.
           | 
           | https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/BinatAndSp.
           | ..
        
             | fulafel wrote:
             | Thanks. It's interesting that after this account the
             | characterisation "fortunately" is still used. But the
             | motivations still give good perspective though i would have
             | done things differently.
        
           | seanhunter wrote:
           | There are definitely large organizations who run split
           | horizon DNS because back in the mists of time they made poor
           | choices and assigned IP addresses that were in the public
           | address namespace (ie not a 10. or 192.168.1. etc) that they
           | didn't own randomly to a large number of legacy subnets
           | within their network. It's now too painful to migrate them,
           | so they are a wart that has to be lived with until they
           | eventually retire.
           | 
           | In the meantime they have to use split dns so they are able
           | to keep things kinda working.
           | 
           | I have personally worked at least a couple of large orgs that
           | have this setup (ie 100s or 1000s of ancient devices on
           | internal networks squatting on what are actually public IPs).
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | It would be nice if Firefox supported some way to automatically
       | rotate which backend provider it's using for DoH. This would keep
       | any one entity from having a continuous feed of every DNS lookup.
        
         | tristor wrote:
         | That's an interesting idea. I wonder how you'd feel about this
         | in relation to the trade-off against multiple resolver
         | providers having information about your Internet traffic? By
         | using a single provider, you limit your risk exposure, but also
         | increase your reliance on that provider. So it's not clear-cut
         | that this would necessarily be beneficial.
        
           | rakoo wrote:
           | It's actually a very good point, and Tor is explicitely using
           | a single entry guard because of that: it was analyzed that
           | keeping a single guard for a long time is "on average" better
           | than regularly changing guards.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | That's a fair point. I think I would still be happier if no
           | one entity had everything. But I do recognize the downside.
        
         | moltar wrote:
         | Great idea. Would a local load balancing proxy do the trick?
        
           | vngzs wrote:
           | Not with a TCP proxy. To establish a HTTPS tunnel, the client
           | needs to know the identity of the remote end for certificate
           | validation. Randomizing remote ends with a naive proxy would
           | lead to TLS errors.
           | 
           | So you'd likely configure your browser to do DoH destined for
           | that proxy, and have the proxy generate DoH requests to the
           | remote ends. The downside is you'd have to somewhat manually
           | set up certificate trust between your client and your proxy -
           | either by trusting the proxy's certificate, or installing a
           | root CA that issues the proxy's certificate in your browser's
           | trust store.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | I use my PiHole to do balancing like this. I've set it up
           | with DoT and DoH so that DNS requests are spread across
           | several servers.
           | 
           | Then, I expose my PiHole as a DoT + DoH server (DoT for Linux
           | and Android, DoH for Firefox) so that I can always use my ad
           | block lists and secured DNS traffic.
        
             | unethical_ban wrote:
             | I don't understand.
             | 
             | I have a PiHole, and have the cloudflare DoH client
             | installed on it.
             | 
             | Requests from my network go to the PiHole, and the PiHole
             | is set to query localhost:5053, which then hits a DoH
             | provider.
             | 
             | Why do you have separate setups for mobile vs. desktop web
             | browser, why not have the OS do native DNS to your PiHole?
        
               | jeroenhd wrote:
               | When I'm on my laptop, in the train, working on Windows,
               | I can't use my home DNS without exposing it to the world
               | and becoming part of every DDoS attack there is. So, for
               | those situations, I've got Firefox set up to do DoH.
               | Windows can do some DNS encryption through a complex
               | setup of local DNS servers but it's nothing as easy as
               | the standard Linux setup.
               | 
               | Similarly, I use DoT on my phone but if I want to connect
               | to any hotspot, I have to disable DoT because the hotspot
               | login detection fails with DoT configured. I think it's a
               | Xiaomi thing. Regardless, I need to disable it to use. In
               | one particular case (scanning groceries in the
               | supermarket for the automated payout) I can't fall back
               | to LTE like usual. Just in case I forget to turn DoT back
               | on, I've also configured Firefox on my phone to use DoH
               | because the mechanism is there and I might as well.
               | 
               | There's small edge cases where I just like to fall back
               | to browser DoH. DoT and I'm network DNS still works fine,
               | of course.
        
             | Thiez wrote:
             | Doesn't this just result in _more_ organizations having
             | your data? Presumably most DNS entries have some finite
             | TTL, such as a few minutes  / hours / days. Let's say one
             | of your favorite websites has a TTL of 10 hours, and you
             | visit this website once per day. Then eventually (soon!)
             | you will have asked most or all of your servers for that
             | domain, so now they _all_ have your data. Or do you have
             | your PiHole configured that it always asks the same server
             | for the same domain?
        
               | 3np wrote:
               | You could share the namespaces using some consistent
               | hashing so any given domain would hit the same server.
               | 
               | Maybe something exists for that already?
        
               | jeroenhd wrote:
               | You're right that this is the case. I set it up so that I
               | can use the double encryption system with a DoH proxy
               | when I eventually resolve this issue. In practice, 60% is
               | my traffic ends up at cloudflare already, so I might as
               | well use their DNS until then.
               | 
               | It's also an availability thing. There's that one archive
               | website on a vendetta against cloudflare for not
               | forwarding enough data in DNS requests (eDNS or
               | something?) that I can access by using alternative
               | servers as well. In the rare case of a cloudflare outage,
               | this also ensures uptime.
               | 
               | DNS cannot be made fully anonymous, though that double
               | encrypted DoH thing seems promising. Picking a few
               | trusted providers isn't a problem for me personally.
        
         | np-tokumei wrote:
         | Distributing DNS queries across several resolvers is a good
         | idea to make sure there's no single resolver would be able to
         | learn the entire browsing history of a user. However, this
         | distribution algorithm should be designed with care because
         | distributing queries in a random or round-robin manner would
         | lead to even worse privacy since every resolver will eventually
         | learn the entire browsing history of the user.
         | 
         | We have conducted some preliminary work on this idea and shared
         | it with the team at Firefox, but I guess the current number of
         | Trusted Recursive Resolvers is not large enough. However, I do
         | believe that once Firefox have more than a dozen TRRs, (or if
         | Firefox allows users to input more than just one customized DoH
         | resolver), our proposed K-resolver resolution mechanism would
         | help to increase the privacy benefit of DoH even further.
         | 
         | "K-resolver: Towards Decentralizing Encrypted DNS Resolution"
         | 
         | https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/23...
        
         | goodpoint wrote:
         | Rotating between a handful of providers could be a net negative
         | for privacy:
         | 
         | - every FQDNs you resolve is leaked to at least one provider
         | 
         | - the FQDNs you resolve often (e.g. every day) are leaked to at
         | all the backend providers over time
         | 
         | If you want to protect your privacy you need DNS resolution
         | over Tor.
        
           | JoshTriplett wrote:
           | While I agree that rotating might be a net negative, that
           | particular issue could be worked around: hash the FQDN and
           | use the hash to determine which provider you use, so that a
           | given user always resolves a given FQDN with the same
           | provider. (Salt the hash, so that different users use
           | different providers for that FQDN.)
           | 
           | It's still not clear if it's a win to rotate, but if you were
           | going to rotate, that would help.
        
             | goodpoint wrote:
             | That's not rotation, by definition.
             | 
             | (and hardly beneficial for privacy: you just divided the
             | FQDNs you leak across 3-4 providers)
        
               | JoshTriplett wrote:
               | The only advantage would be in reducing the ability to
               | correlate a user's sites.
               | 
               | But nonetheless, I agree.
        
       | justusthane wrote:
       | As a sysadmin for an organization with our own internal DNS
       | servers that clients need to hit, how will this impact us? Do I
       | need to deploy a GPO to disable DoH in order to force FF to keep
       | using our DNS servers?
        
         | gnabgib wrote:
         | There's a windows GPO key[0] and a canary domain[1] you can
         | NXDOMAIN (use-application-dns.net). Both of these only control
         | the default (it won't override a user personally choosing the
         | setting).
         | 
         | [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-
         | templates/blob/master/READ...
         | 
         | [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-
         | appli...
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Ah, so users can choose to override the local network
           | administration? I didn't realise that. No way to prevent my
           | family browsing to undesirable and unsafe sites without
           | personally admin-ing each device and/or directly monitoring
           | use?
           | 
           | I realise this is currently all leaky, my attitude was to put
           | controls in place (DNS based) and if they learnt to hack
           | around it then they're probably old enough to handle what
           | they find ... doesn't work for malware, etc., however.
           | 
           | Presumably enabling DoH makes malware, advertising, etc.,
           | impossible to block?
           | 
           | When is MS Windows going to use DoH to force access for
           | monitoring, currently I block a few domains.
        
             | Xylakant wrote:
             | > When is MS Windows going to use DoH to force access for
             | monitoring, currently I block a few domains.
             | 
             | Microsoft doesn't need DoH to circumvent DNS-based
             | blocking. They control the OS and can make it do anything.
        
             | josephcsible wrote:
             | > No way to prevent my family browsing to undesirable and
             | unsafe sites without personally admin-ing each device
             | 
             | No there's not, for good reason. From a technical
             | perspective, this is indistinguishable from an abusive
             | spouse or oppressive government trying to block sites.
        
             | tomjen3 wrote:
             | I hope by family you mean your children? Because otherwise
             | this feature is very much designed to you and what you do.
        
             | shawnz wrote:
             | > Ah, so users can choose to override the local network
             | administration? ... Presumably enabling DoH makes malware,
             | advertising, etc., impossible to block?
             | 
             | It was always trivially possible to bypass DNS-based access
             | control. Even before the establishment of DoH as a
             | standard, you could have just served a text file containing
             | the IP over HTTPS.
        
         | josephcsible wrote:
         | Do you use split-horizon DNS, or do all of your internal
         | domains fail to resolve externally? If the former, then add
         | your organization's domains to network.trr.excluded-domains. If
         | the latter, everything will still work without you needing to
         | do anything.
        
         | chaz6 wrote:
         | This is answered in the FAQ at https://support.mozilla.org/en-
         | US/kb/dns-over-https-doh-faqs...
        
           | justusthane wrote:
           | Ah, thank you.
        
         | tremon wrote:
         | You will want to employ DPI anyway, to make sure no other
         | apps/devices on your network subvert your internal security.
         | DoH is just another signature to detect and block.
        
         | shawnz wrote:
         | It will automatically fall back to the internal DNS for names
         | that don't resolve externally, so you might not need to do
         | anything
        
         | ocdtrekkie wrote:
         | I recommend using Firefox's GPOs anyways: Not just to ensure
         | users can't override disabling DoH, but also to turn off
         | arbitrary extension install (a major malware vector) and other
         | protocols designed to circumvent security inspection like QUIC.
         | 
         | If you operate any network security appliances of any kind,
         | browsers are basically built-by-default now to circumvent them,
         | so you need to be configuring them heavily via group policy.
         | 
         | Firefox, Chrome, and Edge all offer ADMX templates to add
         | support for their policies pretty much drop-in to Active
         | Directory.
        
       | hulitu wrote:
       | They force DoH in the name of freedom. What will be the DoH
       | resolver ? Cloudfare ? Google ? One must use GP to disable this
       | on Win or a DNS server on linux Everyday the reasons to keep
       | firefox are converging to 0.
        
         | admax88q wrote:
         | > They force TLS in the name of freedom. Who will be the
         | certificate provider? VeriSign? Comodo? One must use
         | certificate manager or their own certificate server on linux.
         | Everyday the reasons to keep firefox are converging to 0.
        
           | FranchuFranchu wrote:
           | > They force package managers in the name of freedom. Who
           | will be the server? Canonical? RedHat? One must use wget,
           | tar, and gcc on linux. Everyday the reasons to keep GNU/Linux
           | are converging to 0.
        
         | woogley wrote:
         | DoH is configurable with GP or just a policies.json file if you
         | want: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-
         | templates/blob/master/READ...
        
           | csunbird wrote:
           | GP is a bit obscure, I was hoping that we can simply use
           | Firefox preferences to point at another provider.
        
             | woogley wrote:
             | You can set custom provider in the settings UI:
             | https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-
             | https#...
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | You can: Settings > General > Network Settings >
             | Settings... > Enable DNS over HTTPS > Use Provider > Custom
        
         | csunbird wrote:
         | How hard would it be to run a private DoH server? (This is a
         | serious question, not a snarky comment)
        
           | kd913 wrote:
           | I run it on my pihole with Dnscryptproxy.
           | 
           | https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Local-DoH
           | 
           | It isn't too hard.
        
           | cuillevel3 wrote:
           | Easy: https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Clie
           | nts#D...
           | 
           | I want to add, that you can't run your own public DNS server
           | nowadays, because it can be misused for DOS and hosting
           | providers scan for open DNS servers.
           | 
           | So if you want your own public DNS resolver, DOH is much
           | easier.
        
             | csunbird wrote:
             | > because it can be misused for DOS and hosting providers
             | scan for open DNS servers
             | 
             | Can you elaborate? I am thinking of doing exactly that, in
             | case of need.
        
               | lights0123 wrote:
               | https://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-inside-a-dns-
               | amplification-...
        
               | csunbird wrote:
               | Very, very interesting... I forgot the fact that ip
               | addresses can be spoofed in the UDP packets, essentially
               | making DNS resolvers to carry out the attack for botnets.
        
               | vengefulduck wrote:
               | DNS servers can be used in an DOS amplification attack by
               | sending requests with spoofed ip addresses. So if you
               | don't take measures to prevent this it's likely your
               | server will be used in DOS attacks.
               | 
               | https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/TA13-088A
        
               | cuillevel3 wrote:
               | You could try to run an IPv6 only DNS server, harder to
               | find.
        
               | outloudvi wrote:
               | One reason is that DNS is UDP based, on which source IP
               | spoofing is possible.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | roody15 wrote:
       | Terrible decision IMO. To default to application level DNS that
       | then defaults to a large centralized DNS provider is the opposite
       | of supporting an open and decentralized internet.
       | 
       | This should be an optional feature that is Opt in. Instead a
       | quick banner appears when you start Firefox and if you don't
       | quickly hit disable ... it enables this by default.
       | 
       | disappointing behavior by Mozilla
        
         | 542458 wrote:
         | I'm not sure how this is significantly worse than the DNS
         | status quo despite being more centralized.
         | 
         | Traditional DNS is very easy for everybody and anybody to snoop
         | and tamper with, including your ISP, the government, the
         | resolver and anybody else with a chunk of network
         | infrastructure on your path. DoH is very hard for anybody but
         | the resolver to snoop or tamper with. The resolvers commit to
         | not selling data and not retaining logs for more than 24h. Of
         | course a court order will take precedence, but we've gone from
         | "anybody who cares can see and tamper with your DNS queries" to
         | "just your resolver can see and tamper with your DNS queries,
         | and they're audited so that'll probably only happen under court
         | order".
         | 
         | All else held equal the increased centralization would make DoH
         | a step backwards - but all else isn't held equal, and
         | traditional DNS is such a bad protocol that most of the
         | advantages of its decentralization don't actually manifest. And
         | it's not like the DNS protocol weaknesses are hypothetical -
         | they're used en masse by regimes and corporations around the
         | world. With that in mind, I'd say default-on is a reasonable
         | decision.
        
         | josephcsible wrote:
         | DNS is heavily abused by network operators for censorship and
         | surveillance purposes. IMO, a slightly more centralized
         | Internet is a good tradeoff to make that impossible. And if the
         | current DoH provider ever does abuse their position, it'd be
         | easy for Mozilla to switch to a new provider.
        
       | netr0ute wrote:
       | What happens if the DoH servers are blocked? I do this at home to
       | stop any client from bypassing PiHole and if FF isn't smart
       | enough to consider this scenario, then that's bad.
        
         | sodality2 wrote:
         | I'd hope your PiHole at least resolves over DoH... if not
         | consider AdGuard Home instead
        
           | netr0ute wrote:
           | It's not the PiHole itself that's the problem, but rather the
           | clients on the LAN. I already redirect the PiHole's traffic
           | over a VPN so the ISP is none the wiser, but I could go
           | further and use DoH for that too.
        
         | tristor wrote:
         | PiHole uses the DoH canary domain by default, so if you use
         | PiHole it should just work without any effort on your part, and
         | effectively disables DoH network wide. You can search how to
         | encrypt the lookups that PiHole makes itself, a common scenario
         | is to install cloudflared on the PiHole and point it at
         | localhost, which you can see here:
         | https://nathancatania.com/posts/pihole-dns-doh/
        
           | Y_Y wrote:
           | Even if you specify them by IP? I specifically redirect
           | addresses like 8.8.8.8 to my pihole (at the router) to
           | prevent cheeky applications circumventing it.
        
             | tristor wrote:
             | I'm not certain, but I believe that would still work,
             | because the lookup for the canary domain is done using the
             | local resolver and if you are redirecting its configuration
             | to your PiHole, the PiHole would respond. It sounds like
             | you have a relatively unique network configuration, so I'd
             | advise that you test this and share the results with all of
             | us.
        
               | zinekeller wrote:
               | Not OP, but yes, it should work (as long as you're
               | talking plain DNS on port 53. Direct DoH, you're out of
               | luck unless you want to DPI or block IPs (and if it's
               | Cloudflare, it's block all of Cloudflare or allow their
               | DoH version of 1.1.1.1).
        
             | zinekeller wrote:
             | It'll still work, check if use-application-dns.net returns
             | NXDOMAIN.
        
         | roody15 wrote:
         | It fallbacks to local DNS
        
           | netr0ute wrote:
           | This is the kind of answer I needed.
        
         | rany_ wrote:
         | Firefox checks if use-application-dns.net is blocked, if it
         | finds that it isn't blocked it ends up trying to use DoH.
         | 
         | https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...
        
       | admax88q wrote:
       | There's a lot of lament that this bypasses the operating system
       | level config, but I feel like we wouldn't be here if the
       | operating system had stepped up their DNS any time in the last
       | several years.
       | 
       | This is a workaround for the fact that many networks are hostile
       | to DNS lookups (injecting ads, tracking, captive portals), and
       | operating systems continue to just default to the ISPs DNS
       | provider, which is often hostile.
       | 
       | OS's could have switched to running their own local caching
       | resolver ala unbound years ago, could have integrated DNSCrypt or
       | DoT years ago. But instead the defaults are still horribly
       | unsecure for the average user.
       | 
       | For the techie user who's running PiHole or some custom local
       | DNS, yeah this will be annoying, but for the average user who's
       | just delegating to their ISP that is then tracking their DNS
       | lookups and injecting ads if they mistype a domain, this is a
       | win.
        
         | slim wrote:
         | Mozilla wants to be the gatekeeper to their users. Every
         | company and it's dog wants to do this. "If you are not paying
         | for the product, you are the product" should become "if you are
         | a customer/user, you are also a product".
        
         | ignoramous wrote:
         | > _There 's a lot of lament that this bypasses the operating
         | system level config, but I feel like we wouldn't be here if the
         | operating system had stepped up their DNS any time in the last
         | several years._
         | 
         | OSes are relegated to support myriad environments with adhoc
         | yet byzantine configuration. A browser's primary objective is
         | to be a "user-agent" (as opposed to, say, subscribing to the
         | whims of ISPs / Governments / anti-digital-rights-companies-
         | masking-as-cyber-security-firms).
         | 
         | > _For the techie user who 's running PiHole or some custom
         | local DNS, yeah this will be annoying, but for the average user
         | who's just delegating to their ISP that is then tracking their
         | DNS lookups and injecting ads if they mistype a domain, this is
         | a win._
         | 
         | Internet censorship, which most of the population in the West
         | isn't subject to or even aware of, is the primary reason DoH-
         | in-a-browser is widely lauded. It just works, and thwarts all
         | cheaper attempts at surveillance and censorship. Though, the
         | likely effect would be, deep-packet-inspection becomes common
         | place, but the imminent ESNI standard has that one covered,
         | too.
         | 
         | As someone who builds and maintains an open-source DoH
         | resolver, I have come to fully appreciate the control and power
         | a resolver running over HTTP/S puts in the hands of the users,
         | both in the client and on the resolver-side.
        
           | Hizonner wrote:
           | > the imminent ESNI standard has that one covered, too.
           | 
           | Too slow, I'm afraid. Word on the street is that any hello
           | containing ESNI will be blocked from day one in too many
           | places for it to ever get traction, including all of China. I
           | believe draft ESNI is blocked by the GFOC _today_.
           | 
           | To even have a chance of making ESNI/ECH widespread, you'd
           | have to make it mandatory for all TLS. That wouldn't fly
           | politically in the working group, because the "enterprise"
           | people have at least some influence there, and they want to
           | do exactly the same kinds of DPI that North Korea would want
           | to do. Even if it came out mandatory on the standards track,
           | it would probably _still_ fail at this point.
           | 
           | It might have worked if it'd been mandatory in TLS 1.2 or
           | even TLS 1.3, but it seems too late now.
           | 
           | We'll see if they also disrupt DoH to the point of making it
           | unusable. I bet they at least give it a try.
        
         | Hizonner wrote:
         | If Mozilla cared about _preventing_ DNS tampering, they could
         | have done DNSSEC 10 years ago. That would have totally killed
         | ads, ISP typosquatting, and captive portals. They, like all
         | browsers, rejected that source of end-to-end security.
         | 
         | The fact is that they want to _enable_ DNS tampering, because
         | they want to use it as a way of enforcing their idea of
         | "safety". So they're building this giant, highly centralized,
         | and easily pressured, infrastructure of "trusted resolvers"
         | that can mess with your DNS results to their heart's content.
         | This will, of course, be a huge attractant for bad actors who
         | want to do things even more harmful than injecting obnoxious
         | advertizing.
         | 
         | As for privacy, the only way that can work, even with something
         | like DNSCrypt, is if the _individual user_ chooses the resolver
         | from among a _very large set_ of possibilities.. which Mozilla
         | is not enabling. Either that, or relatively exotic
         | anonymization stuff that 's not actually worked out, and that
         | Mozilla has shown zero interest in working out. "Trusted
         | resolvers" just move the privacy problem to a different place,
         | and, again, it's a highly centralized place that's easy to
         | subvert.
         | 
         | And DNS-over-TCP is desirable for sure, but it does nothing
         | about tampering _or_ privacy. It 's just irrelevant, except
         | maybe as a preliminary step making it easier to deploy some of
         | the stuff that might actually help.
        
           | kadoban wrote:
           | How could Mozilla have "done" DNSSEC 10 years ago? Isn't that
           | pretty much just not in their control?
        
             | Hizonner wrote:
             | If TLDs are signed (which they have been for a long time),
             | and if the browser checks DNSSEC, you can't typosquat,
             | because you can't spoof the TLD server's signature on the
             | typo. That requires no cooperation from anybody but the
             | browser and the TLD.
             | 
             | WIth DNSSEC enabled, somebody can still impersonate an
             | unsigned domain, but the whole reason that there are so
             | many unsigned zones _to begin with_ is that nothing checks
             | the signatures, so there 's no incentive to sign. By
             | actually doing the checks, browsers, including Firefox,
             | could have created an incentive for widespread DNSSEC
             | signing.
             | 
             | So they could have both unilaterally gotten a lot of
             | benefit for their users, _and_ encouraged wider DNSSEC
             | deployment that would have produced further benefit.
             | 
             | Add in DANE, and it would also have given a much more
             | satisfying fix for a bunch of CA issues that they've chosen
             | to band-aid with stuff that only half works. You could
             | probably even have gotten to a world with zero-cost TLS
             | certs well before enough pressure built up to make Lets
             | Encrypt come along.
        
               | kadoban wrote:
               | Interesting, thank you. That does sound more satisfying
               | as a fix (though also sounds harder and possibly riskier.
               | If they're the only ones checking, will some sites be
               | broken only in Firefox?)
        
           | tialaramex wrote:
           | One of the reasons Mozilla couldn't "do" DNSSEC 10 years ago
           | over plaintext DNS is that for some (enough) clients this
           | doesn't work. Their DNS is broken, it was always broken, but
           | so long as you only ever ask something easy like
           | "news.ycombinator.com A?" it worked well enough. Asking
           | DNSSEC queries doesn't work. "Last Change Broke It" rules
           | apply so Mozilla gets the blame.
           | 
           | With DoH of course this is much less relevant. The people
           | operating Trusted Resolvers for DoH are obliged to actually
           | implement the protocol correctly.
           | 
           | If you choose a DoH provider which does DNSSEC for you (such
           | as Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1), and you trust that provider, your
           | answers are DNSSEC validated, today, without any changes to
           | Firefox. Millions of people benefit, zero work.
           | 
           | If you're concerned that Trusted Resolvers aren't enough
           | privacy, Oblivious DoH eventually means that the TRs don't
           | see your query any more, so the people answering the query
           | don't know who you are, and people who know who you are don't
           | know what your query is.
        
             | Hizonner wrote:
             | I'll bet a comparable number of clients won't be able to
             | reach DoH servers for one reason or another. Especially
             | because there seem to be people who are going to actively
             | try to block them. Whenever you change anything, something
             | will break.
             | 
             | And it would have been relatively easy to put up a notice
             | that said "your DNS server seems to be dropping all EDNS0
             | data or whatever stupid thing it's doing; would you like to
             | switch servers"? Which would have avoided centralizing
             | _everybody_ by _default_.
             | 
             | I know there were enterprise firewalls that broke DNSSEC on
             | any packet that went through them... but frankly the
             | sellers of those firewalls deserved to get heat, and any
             | enterprise that would _deploy_ that kind of broken crap isn
             | 't an organization I'd want to support as user.
             | 
             | And that _still_ doesn 't justify putting DNS on top of
             | _HTTP_ of all things. But that 's another story.
             | 
             | As for Cloudflare doing DNSSEC checks, the fact that I
             | shouldn't be trusting Cloudflare to do the validation for
             | me is kind of the point. Validation (final validation, at
             | least) belongs in the endpoint.
             | 
             | If "oblivious DoH" is what it sounds like, it sounds like
             | maybe I have to retract "zero interest in exotic
             | anonymity". Which I am very happy to have to do.
        
         | floatingatoll wrote:
         | Release (not beta) macOS already lets you configure your system
         | to use DNS-over-HTTPS, if you know the magic incantation to
         | chant at it. Apple hasn't added UI for it _yet_ , but it's
         | available and works when enabled.
        
         | throw0101a wrote:
         | > _This is a workaround for the fact that many networks are
         | hostile to DNS lookups (injecting ads, tracking, captive
         | portals), and operating systems continue to just default to the
         | ISPs DNS provider, which is often hostile._
         | 
         | This _workaround_ is hostile to _my own_ network (home or work)
         | being able to track requests. I control my router  / DCHP
         | server, and I should be able to tell devices where to send DNS
         | requests.
         | 
         | Anything that does not do what I tell it to do is malware IMHO.
        
         | elric wrote:
         | So the fact that some ISPs are apparently untrustworthy is
         | enough to blow up the whole thing which has worked pretty well
         | for the past 30 years?
         | 
         | There are plenty of valid use cases for captive portals. But
         | yes, injecting ads and tracking are obviously messed up, but
         | DNS is only a tiny part of that problem, and I don't see how
         | using DoH will help with them. If you want to get rid those,
         | then get rid of shitty ISPs. This is throwing out the baby with
         | the bathwater.
         | 
         | This will simply lead to ISPs and network operators blocking
         | DoH. And instead of a wonderfully decentralized DNS, we'll end
         | up with centralized DoH in the hands of Cloudflare and their
         | ilk. Who have been shown repeatedly to be user hostile;
         | especially towards privacy conscious users.
        
           | kadoban wrote:
           | Can they block DoH, with reasonable tradeoffs? How?
           | 
           | And will they care enough? I get the sense that they don't
           | really gain that much from messing with DNS, relatively.
        
             | Hizonner wrote:
             | They couldn't necessarily block _all_ DoH, but they could
             | destroy its prevalence by just blocking all of the default
             | resolvers and all of the resolvers that the browsers
             | suggest to users. Those are public lists.
             | 
             | I suspect you're right that they don't get that much value
             | from messing with DNS, though... not enough to deal with
             | the user complaints they'd get. So they probably wouldn't
             | bother unless pressured.
             | 
             | However, they _might_ decide to  "play chicken" with
             | Mozilla and other sources of DoH apps by seeing who yielded
             | to the user complaints _first_. There 'd be a big
             | temptation for Mozilla to fall back to "regular" DNS if DoH
             | failed, and then the ISP would effectively win.
        
               | kadoban wrote:
               | They'd have to block by domain name, right, and block all
               | HTTPS traffic to those domains? I somehow suspect that
               | browers can win that particular cat and mouse game just
               | by making the domains too important to block (share the
               | domain with something users care about). Maybe I'm
               | missing something there though, it probably is more
               | complicated than just that.
        
               | Hizonner wrote:
               | In the end, DoH has to either start with some kind of
               | seed IP address, even if it's a cache-priming DNS A
               | record, or use a (presumably attackable) _non-DoH_ lookup
               | to find its server. You can 't start with a domain name
               | for the server that you use to resolve _all_ domain
               | names.
               | 
               | But I don't think that's very important, because domain
               | names always resolve to IP addresses anyhow, and you
               | can't change the IP addresses _that_ fast.
               | 
               | So you would have to share an _IP address_ with something
               | "too important to block". The political problem with
               | _that_ tends to be that the operators of things that
               | might be too important to block tend to think that those
               | things are too important to expose to any _risk_ of being
               | blocked, say by sharing them with something that somebody
               | might _want_ to block.
               | 
               | It's also not always administratively or technically
               | trivial to share the domain name _or_ IP address(es) of
               | some giant public Web service with another fundamentally
               | unrelated service like DoH.
               | 
               | I mean, sure, in the end, if enough large organizations
               | tried hard enough, they could eventually come up with
               | ways to make it pretty painful to block... but those
               | large organizations tend to have overriding commercial
               | concerns... and not to want to overtly taunt large
               | governments...
        
           | syoc wrote:
           | The "some ISPs" is really important here.
           | 
           | This is very much a US thing, I don't know as much about the
           | situation in Canada, might be as bad. I really hope that this
           | is not the begging of a roll out to the rest of the world.
        
           | qmarchi wrote:
           | > If you want to get rid those, then get rid of shitty ISPs.
           | 
           | Good luck, when 30M+ only have DSL as an option, and >70%
           | only have one Cable provider, and one DSL provider.
           | 
           | FCC Data: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-
           | comparison?version=jun20...
           | 
           | More Info: https://www.theverge.com/22177154/us-internet-
           | speed-maps-com...
        
           | Animats wrote:
           | _So the fact that some ISPs are apparently untrustworthy is
           | enough to blow up the whole thing which has worked pretty
           | well for the past 30 years?_
           | 
           | Right. In place of that, we get one central point of DNS
           | censorship. Where any unapproved site can be made to
           | disappear.
           | 
           | "CIRA Canadian Shield" "Truly free". Right. "Freedom is
           | Slavery" is more like it. In the US, Mozilla is apparently
           | putting users under the thumb of Cloudflare.[1]
           | 
           | I'd rather have a mode where regular DNS and centrally
           | controlled DNS are compared, and you get a popup if they
           | differ. That warns you of censorship attempts. But that
           | doesn't seem to be an option.
           | 
           | [1] https://forum.netgate.com/topic/133679/heads-up-be-aware-
           | of-...
        
         | nimbius wrote:
         | >There's a lot of lament that this bypasses the operating
         | system level config
         | 
         | systemd-resolved has the clandestine ability to forward all
         | your DNS traffic to google in many distributions of Linux. I
         | would say the state of resolution in general is getting
         | uncomfortably sketchy.
         | 
         | many wireless routers from Asus and others due to a buggy (or
         | perhaps intentional) implementation of Dnsmasq will quietly
         | intercept your DNS requests using their own built-in resolver.
         | RT-ARCH13 is notorious for it even if NAT mode is disabled.
         | 
         | for my pihole implementation I block 53 outbound and do DoH
         | resolution using cloudflared on the pi.
         | 
         | finally it bears remembering that the number one largest
         | opposition to the use of DoH was ISP's who were (and still are)
         | making a killing selling your search history. they went so far
         | as to lobby congress to stop DoH. Now the very same ISP's we
         | tried to protect users from are part of the DoH club anyway
         | because, well, money talks.
         | 
         | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/comcast-mozilla-...
        
           | danudey wrote:
           | I recently tried setting up microk8s, since Ubuntu was
           | pushing it pretty hard and it seemed useful, but a lot of
           | stuff wouldn't work at all.
           | 
           | Turns out that the microk8s config uses cloudflare DNS by
           | default, and not your currently configured DNS or any kind of
           | local DNS proxy. This was hugely frustrating because it's not
           | the configuration that I would expect, it's not obvious why
           | things are failing, and, in our case, it's sending internal
           | DNS names to an external DNS server, unencrypted, over the
           | public internet.
           | 
           | Surely it's convenient, but definitely not trustworthy.
        
         | TurningCanadian wrote:
         | I didn't realize that Fedora dropped that proposal
         | https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1511
         | 
         | May have been related to IPv6? Not sure.
         | 
         | I remember trying it out at the time (https://fedoraproject.org
         | /wiki/Changes/Default_Local_DNS_Res...) and not running in to
         | issues
        
         | vbezhenar wrote:
         | How OS is going to circumvent local DNS? Hardcode 1.1.1.1? It's
         | very easy for ISP to block this address.
        
       | rank0 wrote:
       | I'm not sure how I feel about DoH. It seems like there a ton of
       | unnecessary overhead added by placing the super lightweight DNS
       | protocol on top of HTTP. My initial reaction is also that I might
       | lose some control over my network and which domains hosts query
       | on my network. Are things like DNS sinkholes and domain
       | blacklisting still possible with DoH?
        
         | outloudvi wrote:
         | > Are things like DNS sinkholes and domain blacklisting still
         | possible with DoH?
         | 
         | Surely they are... but the guy might not be your ISP but
         | Cloudflare.
         | 
         | EDIT: In Canada that would be that so-called CIRA (by default).
         | But you always have control who can pollute your DNS, right?
        
           | outloudvi wrote:
           | Oh, as an addition, the one that really protects you from
           | fake DNS records is DNSSEC (given you have trust on ICANN or
           | so).
        
         | tialaramex wrote:
         | You don't get to control what _my_ devices do just because you
         | control a network they 're transiting through. Even if DoH had
         | never been standardised, clearly _my_ devices can do this
         | anyway.
         | 
         | On the other hand, if you actually control _your_ devices DoH
         | shouldn 't be a problem, you can have them talk to whichever
         | servers you prefer regardless of the protocol.
         | 
         | As to the lightweight thing. We get a few benefits from running
         | DNS on top of HTTPS rather than say TLS (which also exists, as
         | DoT)
         | 
         | 1. HTTPS allows us to put parameters in the URL which are thus
         | confidential (HTTPS will encrypt them) and have those control
         | the DNS lookup. So dns-server.example can offer all its users
         | their own URL, even though they all talk to the exact same
         | server (dns-server.example.com) and a snoop can't tell that one
         | device used the rank0 account while another device used the
         | tialaramex account, those are encrypted in the URL, yet the
         | actual server can see which is used and maybe my devices get
         | "pure" answers while yours have ad-blocking or whatever.
         | 
         | 2. DNS doesn't have a rich error vocabulary. For your ad-
         | blocked domains, a traditional DNS server has to either lie
         | (bogus answer) or claim no answer exists (NXDOMAIN or OK 0
         | answers) but HTTP has a rich variety of error codes. Maybe 403
         | Forbidden is appropriate for the Xian parent who doesn't want
         | their teenager looking at pornhub.com and 451 Unavailable For
         | Legal Reasons is appropriate for a DNS service which excludes
         | Pirate Bay due to lawsuits.
        
           | iso1210 wrote:
           | You want to use _my_ network you live by my rules. You don 't
           | have to connect to it.
        
           | akersten wrote:
           | > You don't get to control what my devices do just because
           | you control a network they're transiting through.
           | 
           | And if I run a guest wifi in one of the many countries where
           | I have legal obligations to take steps to block illegal
           | traffic because I am ultimately responsible for the emissions
           | of my network, what would you suggest I do?
           | 
           | > DNS doesn't have a rich error vocabulary. For your ad-
           | blocked domains, a traditional DNS server has to either lie
           | (bogus answer) or claim no answer exists (NXDOMAIN or OK 0
           | answers) but HTTP has a rich variety of error codes.
           | 
           | It's a good thing that DNS has a limited vocabulary of error
           | codes. I want the garbage website to think it couldn't load
           | the ad because of a mysterious DNS issue. Having a reason
           | like "DNSHTTP 486: Blocked by Client" would just make it that
           | much easier for the site to deny you access/track you/detect
           | your blocking activity.
        
             | tialaramex wrote:
             | As with steps someone might have a legal obligation to take
             | to prevent people from thinking negative things about the
             | King or to prevent six from being an even number, you
             | should do whatever you feel is appropriate. It might even
             | make a difference. Perhaps you could put up a notice which
             | says "I run guest WiFi here and I have legal obligations to
             | block illegal traffic so, don't do anything illegal".
             | 
             | It's certainly weird to insist it's everybody's else's
             | problem that you're subject to legal obligations that may
             | be impossible to fulfil.
             | 
             | If the purpose of this "obligation" is to ensure nobody is
             | technically compliant and so they can arrest, imprison or
             | even execute whoever they want, it doesn't seem like that's
             | my fault, or Mozilla's fault, or any of the authors and
             | acknowledged contributors for RFC 8484. Any more than it's
             | Giuseppe Peano's fault that six is even.
             | 
             | And if (as seems most likely) they're just covering their
             | backside, the notice is probably sufficient.
        
             | stinkytaco wrote:
             | > And if I run a guest wifi in one of the many countries
             | where I have legal obligations to take steps to block
             | illegal traffic because I am ultimately responsible for the
             | emissions of my network, what would you suggest I do?
             | 
             | This is an oft overlooked part of these discussions. I
             | manage a public network at a library (which is still the
             | only access point for many people, unfortunately). DNS
             | blacklisting certainly isn't the only tool in the toolkit,
             | but it is one that DoH takes out. I'm genuinely conflicted
             | on DoH because on one hand, I am a privacy advocate, but on
             | the other I run a public network and that comes with
             | certain obligations, both legal (we need to block
             | filesharing) and to customers (we do traffic shaping
             | because the budget it limited and bandwidth isn't cheap).
        
           | dogecoinbase wrote:
           | _You_ are not in control of _your_ devices. Your television
           | will use this technology to report what shows you're watching
           | to the company that manufactured it; the web browser running
           | on your computer will use this technology to report your
           | activity and retrieve advertisements even if you've tried to
           | block them elsewhere.
        
             | iso1210 wrote:
             | It amazes me how people think the worlds largest
             | advertising company is pushing DoH out of alturism. That
             | pihole you're running? That 'steals' money from google. DOH
             | gets rid of that.
        
           | throw0101a wrote:
           | > _On the other hand, if you actually control your devices
           | DoH shouldn 't be a problem, you can have them talk to
           | whichever servers you prefer regardless of the protocol._
           | 
           | I already do tell the devices I control which DNS servers to
           | use via DCHP and IPv6 RA. Firefox is choosing to ignore that
           | by default, and now I have to go through extra steps to solve
           | a problem that Mozilla created by not simply re-using the
           | previous solution ( _gethostbyname(3)_ ).
           | 
           | At the very least if they had simply used the already
           | existing DoT, instead of inventing a new protocol (DoH), I
           | could have monitored port 953 traffic and see which devices
           | were broken. Now I have to figure out devices trying to sneak
           | through my policies.
        
         | luto wrote:
         | > Are things like DNS sinkholes and domain blacklisting still
         | possible with DoH?
         | 
         | they aren't, which is part of the reason DoH is implemented in
         | the first place.
        
           | LinuxBender wrote:
           | Still possible. The control moves from your home network,
           | corporate network or local ISP to the default DoH resolvers
           | defined in the browser. This can be changed, but we know most
           | people outside of a corporation will not change this. So in
           | this case, CIRA will be logging DNS requests and sink-holing
           | undesirable domains presumably by Canadian standards.
           | 
           | People can still use browser add-ons to block domains, URL's,
           | objects on sites, etc... uBlock is my favorite for this.
        
           | cuillevel3 wrote:
           | Here's a blog post from someone who uses nginx 'doh-to-dns'
           | to connect their DoH clients to Pi-hole.
           | 
           | So, yes you can blacklist domains, as long as you can
           | configure the DoH servers that the client uses.
        
             | iso1210 wrote:
             | > as long as you can configure the DoH servers that the
             | client uses.
             | 
             | Which now involves not just getting every machine, but
             | every application on every machine
        
             | AlexCoventry wrote:
             | I think you left the link out.
        
               | duckmysick wrote:
               | I believe it's this one:
               | https://www.aaflalo.me/2018/10/dns-over-https-with-pi-
               | hole/
        
               | cuillevel3 wrote:
               | Oops, I meant this one: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/docum
               | entation/linux/407-building...
        
           | rank0 wrote:
           | Can you expand on this a little more? I do not understand the
           | reasoning here
        
             | ZeroCool2u wrote:
             | DoH makes widespread censorship and surveillance via
             | intercepting plaintext DNS queries much more difficult.
             | 
             | Of course, this is just one weapon in the arms race. It
             | doesn't completely protect you, but every bit helps.
        
             | JoshTriplett wrote:
             | The vast majority of people don't run their own DNS server,
             | or have any control over the DNS server they use.
             | 
             | Most people use their ISP's or organization's DNS server,
             | and have no control over it; instead, it's something used
             | _against_ them. In many cases, that DNS server may do some
             | combination of tracking, redirection to ads, or other
             | things that make it undesirable to use.
             | 
             | DoH eliminates one of the last major unencrypted protocols
             | on the Internet, and instead uses an encrypted protocol to
             | talk _exclusively_ to the intended server without the
             | possibility of interception.
             | 
             | If you _want_ to talk to your ISP 's DNS server, you're
             | free to do so. But that should be your choice, not your
             | ISP's.
        
             | Kalium wrote:
             | The tools to administer a home network, such as DNS
             | blocking and DNS sinkholes, are the same tools nations use
             | to administer their populaces. If the default in Firefox is
             | to enable blocking and sinkholes for the home
             | administrator's benefit, it will similarly be to the
             | benefit of oppressive administrations.
             | 
             | Home administrators who control their endpoints can turn
             | DoH off with relative ease. By comparison, most governments
             | cannot.
        
               | swiley wrote:
               | It would be nice if it would check the resolver config
               | files (like the hosts file) with it enabled though.
               | 
               | That was a really easy way to block harmful stuff or name
               | things without requiring DNS. Having to choose between
               | encryption and easy configuration is pretty poor UX.
        
               | Kalium wrote:
               | Naively, that seems like something that could be a very
               | useful configuration option to set! Though I can also see
               | why you might default to having it off if you don't trust
               | the host resolver very much in the country-administering-
               | people case.
        
               | swiley wrote:
               | You _have_ to trust the local OS config. No amount of
               | clever application programming will ever let you get
               | around that.
        
           | Asdrubalini wrote:
           | Pardon my ignorance, but can't you simply host your own DoH
           | server where you choose the domains you want to block, which
           | in turn points to a DNS / DoH server you trust? I guess it
           | wouldn't be more difficult than hosting your own filtered DNS
           | server like Pi-Hole.
        
             | hulitu wrote:
             | Yes you (or we) can. But you need to manually alter the
             | settings everytime a new ff version is out. And other
             | people can not. Brave new world. BTW how is Brave at this
             | chapter ?
        
               | cpeterso wrote:
               | Why would you need to manually change your settings every
               | time a new Firefox version is out? Firefox has settings
               | UI to point to the DoH server of your choice and that
               | setting does not get reset by new Firefox versions:
               | 
               | https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-
               | https#...
        
               | ralphm wrote:
               | Why every time? Isn't this a user config that overrides
               | whatever default there is?
        
           | ocdtrekkie wrote:
           | Yep. The entire point is to make it impossible to block ads
           | at the network level. And since ad companies control the
           | application level too, they then have a complete end-to-end
           | ad delivery stack that you can't tamper with.
        
             | donmcronald wrote:
             | Yep. Everything's going to be locked from the bootloader to
             | the screen and you WILL watch the ads.
             | 
             | What I think will really happen is the same thing as
             | everything else. They'll use tech to take away features /
             | abilities we have right now and then rent it back to us as
             | a subscription.
             | 
             | "OpenDNS is now part of Cisco"
             | 
             | Add it up.
        
               | tomjen3 wrote:
               | We are talking about Firefox, a web browser, that allows
               | you the most control over your computer, has the best
               | adblock technology, on which the author of Ublock origin
               | has said his software runs the best, which comes with
               | built-in anti tracking, which now comes with technology
               | making it harder for public wifi to trick your computer
               | into going to captive portals, often with ads.
               | 
               | And somehow you ad this up to making it impossible not to
               | see ads and locked down computers.
               | 
               | How?
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | Firefox's primary sponsor is still Google. And whether
               | they are pushing it because of malice or just
               | incompetence, DoH was designed and built by Google to
               | protect ad companies from network security. Implementing
               | it by default is a hostile act, and one Mozilla should
               | reconsider.
        
               | slashdot2008 wrote:
               | i have a pihole and have been worried that DoH would
               | break it. i checked the network settings in firefox and
               | the DoH setting is there but it is disabled.
               | 
               | I doubt that chrome will allow one to disable DoH but at
               | least firefox does for now.
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | I believe Pihole automatically put in the NXDOMAIN entry
               | needed to disable DoH on Firefox for you. But who knows
               | how long Firefox will respect that, since there's nothing
               | stopping ISPs from employing the same strategy to disable
               | DoH.
        
               | iso1210 wrote:
               | For now.
               | 
               | This is one step in the boiling-the-frog process.
        
             | hulitu wrote:
             | Yes unfortunately this seems to be the reason. Earlier you
             | could tell the resolver to look at files first and filter
             | with your hosts file the ad and other sites. Now you have
             | to do packet inspection. We are living on a planet that's
             | revolving and evolving ...
        
             | JoshTriplett wrote:
             | > The entire point is to make it impossible to block ads at
             | the network level.
             | 
             | The entire point is to make DNS secure. For every 1 person
             | who uses DNS to block ads, there are many thousands who
             | just use their ISP's DNS servers, and thus remain subject
             | to surveillance, ads, redirects, and other malice. You
             | can't possibly believe in good faith that the _entire_
             | point or even the _primary_ point of DoH is to hurt the
             | small fraction of people who use DNS to block ads, rather
             | than to protect the much larger set of people who are
             | subject to the whims and financial interests of their ISP.
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | ISPs do not inject malware and phishing scams, Google Ads
               | does. The benefit of blocking ISP tampering is vastly
               | outweighed by protecting the bad behavior of a far more
               | malevolent party.
        
               | akersten wrote:
               | > ISPs do not inject malware
               | 
               | Not taking a side on this thread, but just want to point
               | out that Comcast _literally_ has a patent describing just
               | such a mechanism. [0]
               | 
               | [0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120224572
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | From said patent:
               | 
               | > including weather, emergency broadcast, and police
               | stations
               | 
               | These seem like reasonable uses of this technology. My
               | ISP has tried to inject a copyright violation notice
               | before. (This was hilarious, actually, because it went to
               | a guest in my house's browser, not one of mine, and I
               | almost didn't hear about it at all, because they only
               | sent it that way once... and I had to _ask_ them to send
               | me an actual letter about it with the details, which
               | would 've been the straightforward way to tell me in the
               | first place...) Irritations with copyright holders aside,
               | that was a notification of a mark against my account,
               | which is arguably information that needed to be delivered
               | to me.
               | 
               | Meanwhile, Google is preserving their ability to send
               | phishing sites unimpeded.
        
               | wbl wrote:
               | Not a Verizon customer I take it?
        
               | JoshTriplett wrote:
               | Google ads (like most ads) are hosted by websites that
               | intentionally put them there; install an adblocker.
               | Google doesn't MITM sites; ISPs and malicious networks
               | do. ISPs are also known to surveil traffic on their
               | networks.
               | 
               | I'm not disputing that Google ads and tracking, like all
               | other ads and tracking, should be blocked. Run a browser
               | you trust, and run an adblocker. But the widespread use
               | of unencrypted DNS is a problem that needs fixing. And
               | DoH provides the most viable solution for that problem,
               | by running DNS over an ordinary HTTPS connection.
        
               | rightbyte wrote:
               | > Google doesn't MITM sites
               | 
               | AMP.
        
             | notatoad wrote:
             | >the entire point is to make it impossible to block ads
             | 
             | the entire point is to make it impossible to modify DNS
             | requests at the network level. this has a lot more serious
             | consequences than just blocking ads. especially for the
             | parties involved with this, none of whom are advertising
             | companies. phishing and data security are actual big issues
             | with financial implications that companies want to prevent.
             | just because blocking ads is the consequence that will most
             | immediately impact you personally, doesn't make it the
             | whole point.
             | 
             | this accusation is especially rich on an article about
             | mozilla, one of the few companies fighting to make sure
             | that advertisers _don 't_ control the application level.
        
               | wbl wrote:
               | Use MDM and configure the browser. Or block the special
               | probe domain Mozilla has for this purpose.
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | > phishing and data security are actual big issues with
               | financial implications that companies want to prevent
               | 
               | These are issues exacerbated by DoH, not fixed by it. DoH
               | assists in the circumvention of security and monitoring.
               | We block ads because they're security problems.
        
               | josephcsible wrote:
               | Control over DNS is neither necessary nor sufficient to
               | block ads.
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | It's not sufficient in itself, but it bears most of the
               | load of network-wide management of harmful traffic. It's
               | the 99% effective method.
               | 
               | Endpoint-level control is no longer possible, since ad
               | companies are skipping the OS network stack and bringing
               | their own. Application-level control is less efficient,
               | and more difficult, particularly when the applications
               | are designed by the same ad companies trying to
               | circumvent DNS control as well. (See Manifest V3.)
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | vbezhenar wrote:
             | Blocking ads at network level is very easy to circumvent.
             | Just serve ads from your domain. It's impossible to block
             | youtube video ads using DNS, for example, you must
             | intercept their API queries and modify them on-the-fly
             | which requires browser extensions or custom apps.
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | It's easy to circumvent if your ads are first party, as
               | in YouTube's case. Most ads are not. Even _most_ Google
               | websites serve ads from ad-specific endpoints, as opposed
               | to their own domain.
        
               | vbezhenar wrote:
               | I think that's because those who care about blocking ads,
               | will block them anywhere. And percentage of those who're
               | using pihole or similar methods to block ads is
               | negligible, so they don't really care about that.
        
               | katbyte wrote:
               | And if your blocking ads your probably not the desired
               | audience of them anyways.
        
             | pitaj wrote:
             | All you need is to point DoH at your own DNS server
        
               | ocdtrekkie wrote:
               | You can't do that with a Chromecast. The goal here is to
               | sell devices which can ensure they always talk to their
               | own DoH endpoint with no ability to secure it.
        
               | shawnz wrote:
               | Chromecast was already bypassing local DNS for years
               | before DoH was even conceived.
               | 
               | Blocking people from using DoH isn't going to solve the
               | problem you are describing, it will just weaken users'
               | privacy. Big vendors like Google will just create their
               | own workarounds.
        
               | akersten wrote:
               | > Chromecast was already bypassing local DNS for years
               | before DoH was even conceived.
               | 
               | Before DoH though, my understanding is a good gateway
               | appliance could just overwrite those DNS requests as it
               | sees them. Now they'll be encrypted, and you'll have no
               | way to tell the Chromecast where to connect (or even to
               | where it is connecting).
        
               | shawnz wrote:
               | If the possibility of having the DNS packets rewritten
               | was a concern for them, any junior developer could have
               | easily implemented a proprietary REST web service to get
               | the IPs over HTTPS just like DoH. Standardization of DoH
               | in browsers isn't really furthering that issue.
        
               | slashdot2008 wrote:
               | How would they get the first IP for the REST client to
               | contact?
        
               | shawnz wrote:
               | That problem isn't solved by DoH, you still need to
               | hardcode the DoH server IP there too if you intend to
               | bypass the network level settings. So a proprietary
               | system would be no different.
               | 
               | All the major appliance vendors (Google, Amazon) already
               | have huge fixed IP ranges to devote to this purpose,
               | which are effectively unblockable because they might be
               | shared with important cloud services.
        
           | swiley wrote:
           | Yes they are but you'd have to run your own DoH server or
           | follow the instructions to disable DoH like an ISP would (the
           | possibility of which makes one wonder what the whole point
           | is.)
        
             | josephcsible wrote:
             | Or just use one of the many public DoH servers that already
             | do this.
        
               | swiley wrote:
               | The won't block my specific list of websites (reddit.com
               | for example.)
        
               | josephcsible wrote:
               | Don't NextDNS and OpenDNS both let you do that?
        
               | swiley wrote:
               | Even if they do, you're now sending _all_ of your DNS
               | queries to some external service. That 's a pretty
               | serious privacy violation, even worse than 8.8.8.8.
        
           | josephcsible wrote:
           | They aren't possible for the network to unilaterally impose
           | on unwilling users. They're still possible if the user
           | actually wants it, by just setting their client's DoH server
           | to one that does them.
        
             | iso1210 wrote:
             | A network suggests a DNS server
             | 
             | You can choose to use that server or not
             | 
             | If a network intercepts your DNS traffic, you can encrypt
             | it yourself. If you don't trust the network you should be
             | encrypting everything anyway
        
         | simias wrote:
         | I think it's an extremely inelegant and overkill solution to a
         | real problem. So, the web in a nutshell.
        
       | np-tokumei wrote:
       | In the current designs, plaintext domain names are mainly exposed
       | through two channels: the SNI extension in TLS, and traditional
       | DNS name resolutions--the deployment of DoH/DoT is thus a
       | prerequisite for ESNI. Equivalently, the use of DoH/DoT will not
       | provide any meaningful privacy if domain names are still exposed
       | through the (unencrypted) SNI extension in TLS handshake traffic.
       | 
       | Recently, there is a push for the deployment of DoH/DoT, with
       | major organizations already supporting it (e.g., Google,
       | Cloudflare, Firefox), though this has not been followed by an
       | equivalent effort for the deployment of ESNI, which is now being
       | reworked in an Internet draft called Encrypted Client Hello (ECH:
       | https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-tls-esni-12.txt).
       | Unless the confidentiality of domain names is preserved on both
       | channels (SNI and DNS), neither technology can provide any actual
       | privacy benefit if deployed individually.
       | 
       | Also many websites hosted on IP addresses that do not host any
       | other domains, the IP information can be used to infer which
       | domain was visited. We have carried out some studies to
       | investigate the extent to which domain name inference can be done
       | through IP address information. For more technical details pls
       | have a look at these papers:
       | 
       | "Assessing the Privacy Benefits of Domain Name Encryption"
       | https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.00563.pdf
       | 
       | "Domain name encryption is not enough: privacy leakage via IP-
       | based website fingerprinting"
       | https://petsymposium.org/2021/files/papers/issue4/popets-202...
        
         | shawnz wrote:
         | Firefox has indeed been making efforts to enable ESNI/ECH
         | alongside their efforts to enable DoH. As you mention, they are
         | mostly only useful together.
        
           | np-tokumei wrote:
           | yea, they have also disabled/removed ESNI since version 85
           | https://www.ghacks.net/2021/02/24/the-case-of-the-missing-
           | es...
           | 
           | Hopefully ECH will make it this time
        
       | lucasyvas wrote:
       | Is it possible to configure multiple DoH providers so your DNS
       | requests round robin like an actual DNS server list could/would?
        
         | cpeterso wrote:
         | You can point Firefox to any DoH provider you like, but there
         | is no setting to set multiple DoH providers. If you are
         | concerned about DoH providers tracking you, it seems like using
         | two DoH providers would give each of them half your browsing
         | history, which probably covers all the same sites as your full
         | browsing history.
         | 
         | https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https#...
        
       | scaryclam wrote:
       | For anyone wondering, DoH = DNS over HTTPS
        
       | enriquto wrote:
       | how could firefox know that you are canadian? the title sounds
       | nonsensical to me
        
       | lucasyvas wrote:
       | Can someone enlighten me as to why this should be a trusted
       | default? Because I inherently wouldn't trust it. I wouldn't say I
       | trust NextDNS, but I currently use them for DoH.
        
         | 0xTJ wrote:
         | I'd argue that if you're using it, you trust it. Otherwise you
         | wouldn't use it. This seems a lot better than just letting the
         | internet provider give a regular DNS.
        
           | xg15 wrote:
           | > _I 'd argue that if you're using it, you trust it._
           | 
           | Nope.
        
           | tremon wrote:
           | _This seems a lot better than just letting the internet
           | provider give a regular DNS_
           | 
           | Why? You're already using your internet provider, so you
           | trust them. Otherwise you wouldn't use them.
        
             | JoshTriplett wrote:
             | I don't want to trust my Internet provider to do anything
             | other than route encrypted packets. I don't want any other
             | service than that from them, and I don't trust them any
             | further than "exchange bandwidth for money".
        
             | dewey wrote:
             | > Otherwise you wouldn't use them.
             | 
             | A lot of times you don't really have a choice which ISP to
             | use so that's not really a good argument.
        
             | recursive wrote:
             | DoH brings us closer to being able to use an internet
             | provider you _don 't_ trust. And I already don't trust my
             | ISP's DNS servers.
        
             | coldpie wrote:
             | No, the point of DOH is that you don't have to trust your
             | ISP. In many countries the ISPs are actively hostile[1].
             | You do have to trust the DOH provider, yes, but in this
             | case Mozilla (or yourself if you have the tech knowledge)
             | will be verifying trust on your behalf. You cannot do that
             | at all with plain ol' DNS.
             | 
             | DOH is a "best of a bad situation" kind of solution, it's a
             | reaction to hostile ISPs. It's not something anyone really
             | likes.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/04/turkish-
             | isps-hi...
        
               | jeltz wrote:
               | DoH means handing your data to one more party since your
               | ISP can already see your SNI headers and the IP
               | addresses. The only thing DoH does is stopping DNS
               | spoofing at the cost of handing your data to a third
               | party.
        
               | coldpie wrote:
               | > The only thing DoH does is stopping DNS spoofing at the
               | cost of handing your data to a third party.
               | 
               | It sounds like you think that's not worth it, but the
               | evidence is that others disagree. Personally, I see both
               | the pros & cons and have no strong feelings either way. I
               | trust Mozilla's evaluation of the pros & cons more than I
               | trust my own so I'm happy to do whatever they think is
               | best, and I suspect most users feel the same way. If you
               | disagree with their evaluation, you can toggle it off in
               | Preferences, and they even show a banner on first start-
               | up giving you that option.
        
         | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
         | Your ISP is selling all of your internet activity to data
         | brokers. This gets added into the detail profile they have on
         | your spending, preferences, political attitudes, and much more.
         | DoH takes that away.
        
           | elric wrote:
           | Maybe your ISP is, but mine is not.
           | 
           | DoH does not take that away. It might move it away from the
           | hands of your apparently adversarial ISP, but delivers the
           | information in the hands of whoever is running those DoH
           | servers...presumably Cloudflare, who already hold far too
           | much sway for my comfort.
        
             | 542458 wrote:
             | To qualify as a DoH resolver you have to agree to not log
             | data for purposes other than providing the service, not
             | keep logs for longer than 24h, and not sell any such data.
             | This is audited.
             | 
             | https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy
        
               | autoexec wrote:
               | Where are you seeing anything about audits? The link just
               | says that Mozilla can decide to remove people from the
               | TRR program. They aren't sending people to Cloudflare and
               | Comcast's server rooms. It's great that should a
               | violation be disclosed to the public Mozilla might remove
               | them, but unless there's a whistleblower the public will
               | never know what's being done with their browsing history.
        
       | tombh wrote:
       | DoH = DNS over HTTPS
        
       | FpUser wrote:
       | I am curious how this will affect various applications and
       | testing suites as those would know nothing about that Mozilla's
       | decision.
       | 
       | All in all it is sickening to watch all those entities trying to
       | to usurp control over the areas that are better not to be fucked
       | with.
        
       | dleslie wrote:
       | Worth noting is that the CIRA is a Canadian organization and so
       | will be restricted by Canadian court orders and regulator
       | rulings.
       | 
       | So this rollout of DoH to Canadians isn't nearly as disruptive as
       | it could be.
        
       | CarelessExpert wrote:
       | Nice to see they'll be making it easy to opt out. I use a Pihole
       | on my network and this would be an enormous PITA if it was hard
       | (or worse, impossible) to disable...
       | 
       | Edit: I forgot, as another commenter pointed out, they also have
       | a canary domain (use-application-dns.net) that you can blackhole
       | to disable this at the network level (unless the user manually
       | enables DoH).
        
         | warhorse10_9 wrote:
         | You can also just set the policy to disable this in registry or
         | using policy.json on Linux. Mac has a similar setup, i'm just
         | not familiar with it.
        
           | CarelessExpert wrote:
           | Yeah, I ended up going the canary domain route, and then
           | setting up my pihole itself to use DoH using cloudflared
           | outbound. Best of both worlds!
        
             | iso1210 wrote:
             | Yes, canary domain is fine - at least while it still works.
             | I don't want to have to configure DNS for 50 different
             | applications on 20 different machines. My OS does DNS, and
             | my DHCP server doles out the DNS server I want my machines
             | to use.
        
               | CarelessExpert wrote:
               | The Mozilla page on the topic
               | (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-
               | appli...) notes that:
               | 
               | > The use of this domain is specified by Mozilla, as a
               | limited-time measure until a method for signaling the
               | presence of DNS-based content filtering is defined and
               | adopted by an Internet standards body.
               | 
               | Presumably that'd be the IETF, and I have no idea which
               | committee would be working on this, if there's a draft
               | RFC in the works, etc. But it's clear the expectation is
               | some sort of standard mechanism will eventually replace
               | the canary domain that yields the same functionality but
               | in a less hacky way.
        
               | Arnavion wrote:
               | There was [1] which would've allowed websites to specify
               | custom DoH resolvers for their subdomains, but it expired
               | some time ago. The same authors are now working on [2]
               | instead, which AFAICT is basically for the same thing.
               | 
               | There's also [3] which is a way for the DHCP server to
               | also provide DoT and DoH servers to the LAN (in addition
               | to the usual DNS servers).
               | 
               | [1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pauly-add-
               | resolver-di...
               | 
               | [2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-add-ddr/
               | 
               | [3]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-add-dnr/
        
         | Arnavion wrote:
         | PSA for network admins: Note that use-application-dns.net must
         | return NXDOMAIN, _not_ (successfully) resolve to 0.0.0.0.
         | 
         | I see plenty of people just adding it to their hosts file
         | blacklists / DNS overrides like they do for other ad and
         | malware domains, such that it resolves to a bad IP like
         | 0.0.0.0. That's not what you should be doing in this case.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-07-08 23:02 UTC)