Re: [Resolverless-dns] Paper on Resolver-less DNS

Anne Bennett <anne@encs.concordia.ca> Mon, 19 August 2019 16:10 UTC

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Subject: Re: [Resolverless-dns] Paper on Resolver-less DNS
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PV = Paul Vixie <paul@redbarn.org>
AB = Anne Bennett <anne@encs.concordia.ca>
ES = Erik Sy <sy@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>


PV>>> i'll want to see how the network operator's policies for
PV>>> dns monitoring and filtering will be reliably detected,
PV>>> and respected.

AB>> I would think this to be an impossible task;

PV> this draft in another wg appears to be an attempt at such:
PV> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sah-resolver-information/
PV> 
PV> i don't know if it can meet the "reliably detected" threshold though.

I took a quick look at the above draft; it specifies a method
for enquiring about "features of a recursive resolver", but
gives no ideas or guidance as to what such features might
consist of, aside from a brief sentence fragment in the
abstract, "such as whether they perform DNSSEC validation or
are available over transports other than what is defined in
RFC 1035".

It seems to me straightforward to use this mechanism to supply
the information *that* a resolver applies filtering, but I don't
see how it could reasonably *describe* the filtering, since
such a description would essentially almost *be* the filtering.

I think your polite assumption that it could be possible for
resolverless DNS to respect a network operator's policies for
DNS filtering is, well, polite.  ;-)

... which brings us to:

ES>> we talked about possible privacy drawbacks of resolver-less
ES>> DNS. However, did we talk about the privacy risks of using a
ES>> traditional DNS resolver? They can monitor the entire browsing
ES>> activities of a user and present the real privacy problem.

PV> DoT (RFC 7858) corrects that privacy problem and is being deployed.

I dispute the idea that DNS over TLS addresses the privacy
problem of the resolver operator having access to all of a
user's DNS queries.

That being said, I think that stating that traditional DNS has the
"real privacy problem", and implying that resolverless DNS doesn't
suffer from a similar problem, is disingenuous.

If I ask a question and expect an answer, *someone* has to hear my
question!  Who would I rather trust: an ISP whose services I pay for,
or a commercial web site where most likely, I *am* the product? 



Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Sysadmin, ENCS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@encs.concordia.ca                                    +1 514 848-2424 x2285