Re: [hrpc] Working group last call for draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 03:14:04PM -0400,
 Mallory Knodel <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 145 lines which said:

> Here’s that text: https://github.com/mallory/DNS-Privacy.

I'm not convinced. This paper has several weaknesses:

* it speaks mostly about *one* deployement model of DoT/DoH, and
criticize it, instead of promoting other models,
* it is very close from the arguments of the Internet access providers
(as presented in RFC 8404) "encryption is a problem for us",
* with the very same arguments about research and monitoring, we could
suppress all encryption. (The paper does not propose a criteria to
separate things that have the right to be encrypted and the things
that would have to stay in clear. Calling DNS requests "metadata" is
may be an attempt to have such a criteria. If so, it is a bad one.)

> Making DNS lookup more private for the user affects internet
> measurements, consolidates service provision

No. There is zero relationship between "making DNS lookup more
private" and "consolidates service provision". Big public DNS
resolvers existed before DoT and DoH (I bet that the vast majority of
requests to 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 are not over DoT/DoH). Saying that
"Making DNS lookup more private for the user consolidates service
provision" is like saying SMTP created Gmail.

> Making DNS lookup more private for the user [...] risks internet
> shutdown for some users

This one really upset me. The responsability of Internet shutdowns is
100% on the side of the censors/governments/etc. Accusing the user who
tried to improve his/her privacy is a bad idea. For every security
measure, the other side will try to find a counter-measure and we
don't accuse security measures of being responsible for the nasty
effects of these counter-measures.

> Needless to say, it is not in the public interest for internet
> traffic to be consolidated on only a few network operators.

And therefore the solution is to have many secure resolvers (in the
same way that the solution to centralized social networks is to have
many instances of a decentralized protocol), not to stop deploying
DoT/DoH.

>  App developers on these platforms can now enable encrypted DNS for
>  app-specific lookups even if the system resolver doesn’t use
>  encrypted DNS or uses a different resolver.

This has nothing to do with DoT or DoH. Applications were always able
to have their own resolution. Anyway, the solution is not to drop
DoT/DoH (see my remark above about the fact that this paper seems to
consider there is only one way to deploy DoT/DoH) but to have the OS
resolver use DoT (Android now does it) or DoH (Windows 11 now does
it).