Engineers at Cloudflare (an Internet privacy company), Apple, and Fastly (which makes a programmable edge cloud platform) have developed a new proposed DNS standard — co-authored by engineers from Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly — that separates IP addresses from queries, so that no single entity can see both at the same time.
They’ve also made the made source code available, so anyone can try out Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH, for short) or run their own ODoH service. Here’s the context, as provided by Cloudflare:
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet. It maps usable domain names, such as cloudflare.com, to IP addresses and other information needed to connect to that domain. A quick primer about the importance and issues with DNS can be read in a previous blog post. For this post, it’s enough to know that, in the initial design and still dominant usage of DNS, queries are sent in cleartext. This means anyone on the network path between your device and the DNS resolver can see both the query that contains the hostname (or website) you want, as well as the IP address that identifies your device.
To safeguard DNS from onlookers and third parties, the IETF standardized DNS encryption with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT). Both protocols prevent queries from being intercepted, redirected, or modified between the client and resolver. Client support for DoT and DoH is growing, having been implemented in recent versions of Firefox, iOS, and more. Even so, until there is wider deployment among Internet service providers, Cloudflare is one of only a few providers to offer a public DoH/DoT service. This has raised two main concerns. One concern is that the centralization of DNS introduces single points of failure (although, with data centers in more than 100 countries, Cloudflare is designed to always be reachable). The other concern is that the resolver can still link all queries to client IP addresses.
Cloudflare is committed to end-user privacy. Users of our public DNS resolver service are protected by a strong, audited privacy policy. However, for some, trusting Cloudflare with sensitive query information is a barrier to adoption, even with such a strong privacy policy. Instead of relying on privacy policies and audits, what if we could give users an option to remove that bar with technical guarantees?
Today, Cloudflare and partners are launching support for a protocol that does exactly that: Oblivious DNS over HTTPS, or ODoH for short.
