Having traffic analysis in your threat model is an extreme choice, typically it means your adversaries include law enforcement agencies or state-level actors. Sending DNS over VPN might just mean that you don’t trust your ISP and think they might intercept the request and forge a response—something which does happen, and I’ve personally observed it at two different ISPs.
My ISP probably forges responses because they have no problem injecting html/js and hijacking ad space on unencrypted connections.
As far as timing attacks, an example would be such: Even though you are at a coffee shop in an undisclosed location miles away from home, if LE has a reason to profile the IP you're broadcasting from at home they could do look at request times and try to link a request from the coffee shop to your home DNS server.
If you use a public DNS server, you have the same benefit of using a public VPN vs a private VPN, in that your traffic gets bundled with everyone else's and obfuscated. It's harder to establish a link between you and the DNS server using network analysis because potentially thousands of connections are being made to that same DNS server from the same VPN node at the same time.
This is wrong, you should not expect political dissidents, whistleblowers, and other people in the same category to use similar techniques to protect themselves.
If you are protecting yourself from different threats, then it is not unreasonable to use different methods to protect yourself. There is an inherent tradeoff between security and usability. If law enforcement or state-level actors are in your threat model, you're going to have to make some extreme usability sacrifices just to keep yourself safe. That means using different systems than other people use.
> Even though you are at a coffee shop in an undisclosed location miles away from home, if LE has a reason to profile the IP you're broadcasting from at home they could do look at request times and try to link a request from the coffee shop to your home DNS server.
You're describing a different system. The system described by kingo555 is just for home.
> As far as timing attacks, an example would be such: Even though you are at a coffee shop in an undisclosed location miles away from home, if LE has a reason to profile the IP you're broadcasting from at home they could do look at request times and try to link a request from the coffee shop to your home DNS server.
That's just traffic analysis. The term "timing attack" refers to something else.
If you're a political dissident, whistleblower, or someone else with law enforcement / state-level actors in your threat model, everything changes. Presumably if you are worried about law enforcement, you put the VPN endpoint outside their jurisdiction. This can make it extremely difficult to do traffic analysis, depending on who your adversary is.
I think it makes sense that not everyone has law enforcement and state-level actors in their threat model.
I don't know how you can say I'm wrong when I was making the general conjecture that people in these categories use privacy-enhancing systems. I don't think you understood me well. I was not specifically referring to any particular set of techniques or systems.
> You're describing a different system. The system described by kingo555 is just for home.
This system is not meant to be used when roaming? Or is this a use case?
> The term "timing attack" refers to something else.
Which is why I specifically listed both timing attacks and traffic analysis separately. They can be interrelated at times but that's not something I feel like discussing.
> If you're a political dissident, whistleblower, or someone else with law enforcement / state-level actors in your threat model, everything changes. Presumably if you are worried about law enforcement, you put the VPN endpoint outside their jurisdiction. This can make it extremely difficult to do traffic analysis, depending on who your adversary is.
I appreciate the lesson in OPSEC but I only asked a simple question and you've devolved into trying to tear apart my comment for errors and lecturing me about things I already know about instead of simply answering the question. In this case, the answer is apparently "Well, your question isn't really relevant because this system is just meant for home use." One helpful sentence, no assumptions and no negativity.
> I think it makes sense that not everyone has law enforcement and state-level actors in their threat model.
Cool. No one was saying anything to the contrary.
kingo555 described a home network, but I don't think it matters. kingo555's threat model doesn't appear to consider traffic analysis, excluding it from the threat model, and that's a very reasonable choice. The system doesn't make any timing attacks easier.
> In this case, the answer is apparently "Well, your question isn't really relevant because this system is just meant for home use." One helpful sentence, no assumptions and no negativity.
I thought that was what I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095304 But I was wrong, and sometimes it takes an entire conversation to discover the differences in assumptions and definitions.