Re: [Doh] [dns-privacy] [DNSOP] New: draft-bertola-bcp-doh-clients

[Michael Sinatra <[e-mail]>]

On 3/13/19 1:43 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> 
> (dropping dprive list at WG chair request)
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> On 13/03/2019 20:29, Brian Dickson wrote:
>> The starting place for the conversation needs to acknowledge this, and
>> accommodate it. It is entirely possible that a DoH client that doesn't do a
>> minimum level of getting user acknowledgement before violating policies,
>> laws, or contracts, might itself be illegal in some jurisdictions
>> (jurisdictions that could include some US states, some western countries,
>> some larger entities like EU, etc.).
> 
> I almost agreed with you that people need to ack others'
> priorities. But the above means I can't agree with your
> mail as "might be illegal" is vastly overstated, there
> being no relevant difference between DoT and DoH clients
> in this respect. 

I believe that the issue of protocol obfuscation that I mentioned
earlier in the draft-reid-doh-operator thread[1] is a relevant difference.

There is another technical issue, and that surrounds the question of who
is the user and what capabilities does the user have to manage their
devices.  This has been touched upon with the discussion on opt-in vs.
default and with Paul's discussion of data exfiltration.

In my home, I have an "Internet-capable" washing machine.  Of course my
"smart" TV wants to be on the Internet.  My Foobot *must* be on the
Internet just so I can monitor the air quality in my own home.  I don't
want the washer on the Internet at all, and for some of the other
devices, I want to control what they do on my home network.  With
embedded and "IoT" devices, there may be limitations on how I--as the
user--can control them.  There may be hard-coded defaults that are
difficult to change (and yet have a way of easily resetting themselves
to "factory default").  Leaving aside for now the issue of licensing
Ts&Cs, I--as the user--may want to have more *technical* control over
the devices than their vendor is willing to give me.  One way I can
assert that control is via the network.  On my home network, I am one of
the users and I am also the network admin.  I want to assert control
over the devices for which *I* am the user, but the people who designed
them didn't give them sufficient knobs for me to do this on the device.

Another word for software which does things on the network outside of
the user's control is "malware," whether it is legitimate or not, and I
realize it predates DoH.  But DoH legitimizes protocol obfuscation at
the network layer and makes it potentially harder for me to control the
devices for which I am the user.  So if the goal is to give users more
control, I'd assert that DoH, at best, works both ways.

michael

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/Qole4yY0q_-psyrvWabaRAD8_Vc