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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

It's bad for privacy in theory because you centralize DNS requests through Cloudflare. In practice ISPs are almost universally reprehensible in how they collect, track, and sell your data. Cloudflare on the other hand has a great reputation for respecting user privacy and they do thrid-party audits on a regular basis so you can have peace of mind about it. Encrypting your DNS requests so your ISP (and other hops on the Internet) can't snoop on it is a huge privacy win.

I'd much rather trust Cloudflare than my ISP. Doubly so when I'm out of the house or traveling abroad.

Practice > theory. Every time.

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> In practice ISPs are the almost universally reprehensible in how they collect, track, and sell your data

... in your country.

For me it's the other way around; i'd rather trust my ISP because privacy laws in my country/EU are much better vs the US.

I interpret the move by Mozilla as hostile in regards of privacy, and i can't understand why EU politics don't intervene when a US company starts hijacking all Firefox users DNS requests (opt-out instead of opt-in.)

The Cloudflare DNS servers you connect to are in the EU and are subject to EU regulation just like your ISP. You don't have 11 ms (or anything sub-~90 ms) latency to the US.

One thing to consider also is that unencrypted DNS means that virtually anyone can read (and modify) those requests, not just your ISP. That can be before the data enters your ISPs network, or at any point that isn't physically or technically well protected. Or, in the case of state actors, at any point really.

> The Cloudflare DNS servers you connect to are in the EU and are subject to EU regulation just like your ISP.

Yeah, sure:

> Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

The CLOUD Act would do nothing in this case because Cloudflare doesn't store data related to your requests and claims they are regularly audited to prove that.

CF has a lot more privacy minded people to whistle blow on that if they were lying than your local ISP would.

Can they be forced to store data?

People at Yahoo were monitoring e-mail on behest of the US government, and not even telling the company's CISO about it:

* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSK...

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi-andor...

"Can they be forced to store data?"

Yes, the Core Secrets leak said the "FBI" would "compel" companies to "SIGINT-enable" their networks if in America. In the Lavabit case, the judge was cool with FBI's proposal to compromise all the users, not tell them about it, and business owner's revenue would be fine. If overseas, there was a spy/soldier group that would take espionage-style action against them. That's if a payment didn't work.

I assume they backdoored all of them, including Apple, with them instructing the companies to hide that fact. They then use parallel construction for the important cases. The less-important cases would go through the regular system. The FBI made a big deal about that one phone to try to expand the All Writs Act to make their access easier. At this point, they probably have access to a lot of it but want their legal, observable powers to be expanded.

That's how it works in a Dual State: a police state with a regular government you can defend against running side-by-side with a more powerful, secret government that can do whatever they want to many targets with secrecy and criminal immunity. Unlike previous Dual States, they restrict the targets and methods of the Deep State more to make its damage invisible to most voters. They think it won't hurt them, just deserving people. Meanwhile, they gradually shift more power previously afforded by the Deep State to the Public State while Deep State collects and passes more information over time to the enforcers of the Public State.

The Snowden leaks confirmed both Deep State activities and the collaboration between the two with denials built in.

I'm not sure.

Going by the Apple example, they refused to create new code to do something they were not in the past. That limit made the courts agree with them that they could not be compelled to create something new.

Yahoo / ISPs already have the data so they have to comply with the law by providing that data upon request.

> Yahoo / ISPs already have the data so they have to comply with the law by providing that data upon request.

Data is being sent to CF: can they be forced to raise the logging level from "INFO" to "DEBUG"? See also Lavabit:

> Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the U.S. Federal Government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to allow the government to spy on Edward Snowden's email.[2][3][4][5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

I imagine that at its scale, CF could legitimately claim technical limitations prevent them from collecting data at the volume of traffic that 1.1.1.1 gets.

With NSA's expert testimony, the FBI could legitimately claim that was BS and provide collection hardware to "assist" them. ;)

I think it's important to realize that this is basically shifting the whole discussion. What DoH is supposed to provide is privacy from your ISP. It's not claiming to provide privacy from the government, and most people don't expect to have DNS privacy from the government (that's not to say it's not desirable). So this point is basically just misdirection.

If your adversary is the United States government, then no, DoH isn't great for you if you're not in the United States and if the US can't get to your ISP / DNS provider anyway, and if your only DoH endpoints are owned by US companies. You also have much bigger problems than DoH is attempting to solve.

> The Cloudflare DNS servers you connect to are in the EU and are subject to EU regulation just like your ISP.

In my (non-EU) country, ISPs are subject to relatively strict regulations, and Cloudflare doesn't fall under those regulations.

> One thing to consider also is that unencrypted DNS means that virtually anyone can read (and modify) those requests

Not "virtually anyone", it would require physical access to the GPON fibre between my home and the MSAN/CO/Exchange (non-trivial, scales really bandly), or the MetroEthernet backhaul from the MSAN to the BNG (where they would trip alarms and the last-mile provider would investigate). From the BNG onwards traffic is encrypted on-the-wire (MPLS with group encryption as far as I know) until it is handed over to the ISP. My ISP co-locates caching DNS with their hand-over routers, so here it would require tapping the fibres in their data-center (not happening without their knowledge).

Also, someone who is just mass-collecting my DNS requests without any other identifying data, and no ability to correlate IP address to users, has limited privacy exposure.

A centralised third-party, who can correlate source IP addresses with user-identifying browser cookies from other HTTP requests in the same time window seems like a much bigger privacy concern.

Americans, please sort out your last-mile provider+ISP monopolies (e.g. lobby your politicians for regulations that enforce competition), so that you can stop forcing unnecessary technical solutions on the rest of the world, who doesn't have this problem (if ISPs do anti-customer things, they lose business).

> or at any point that isn't physically or technically well protected

Kind of off topic, but I was wondering if ISPs use any encryption whatsoever between the home and their IX/servers. Could you theoretically attach something to the wire in the ground, or monitor a satellite-based internet signal, and observe the HTTP/unencrypted data?

There's no additional encryption layer if that's what you're asking. There will still be multiplexing and whatnot, but if you can recover a particular stream from that, it'll be the same stream that the endpoints see.

There is macsec, probably not that common but the ISP I was working for was looking to implement it in their network.

Multiplexing on what?

> Multiplexing on what?

Light.

Optical fibres can move _way_ more data than actual households need, so you use one fibre to move data for, say, 16 endpoints until you get closer, and split it later, saving the cost of 15 long fibres.

You can do everything so that there are no active components out in the field where it's annoying except at the customer site, a passive splitter is quite capable of shoving frequencies A-A' to Alice, B-B' to Bob and so on, it's not just solid state it's completely passive, no more likely to need maintenance than, say, the fibre itself.

Not sure how that is relevant to OP's question then. You're describing PON, ONT-OLT communication is typically encrypted as well which makes the response make even less sense.

Wouldn't say that the cost benefits are from that, majority of the cost is going to be from putting fibre into the ground or on poles, same cost for 1 or 200 pairs. The real benefit is that you don't need any active equipment like in an ethernet distribution network.

> ONT-OLT communication is typically encrypted as well

Is it? I guess that's conceivable though it looks _optional_ to me, but I have no statistics as to how widely the option is taken up.

Nevertheless the G.948 work basically doesn't care about eavesdroppers. The threat model they've engineered around is that Eve lives next to Bob, and so if she tweaks the ONT (which legally belongs to her ISP but is on her property) she can see Bob's messages, whereas we're talking about a fibre tap to receive everybody's messages and then we'll root through that for Bob's messages.

G.948 as amended makes random keys in each ONT and sends them to the OLT, knowing Eve can't see the key chosen by Bob's ONT (it passes upstream not downstream). But as an eavesdropper with a fibre tap we do see both directions so this countermeasure doesn't inconvenience us.

Good on them for spelling out a threat model, and to me their model seems reasonable (if Alice buys Premium Sports for $180 per month we don't want Bob to watch Premium Sports free by pirating Alice's data) but it doesn't stop bad guys snooping this traffic.

Anyone with physical access can read unencrypted traffic if the ISP has not implemented any link layer encryption. All you need is to slightly bend a fiber and it will leak light.

There is a perfectly good alternative which is encrypted DNS or DNS-over-TLS. That should be implemented instead. Sure it’s harder, because it’s decentralized, but that’s the whole point of DNS.

Regulations of cloudfare and an ISP are often hugely different though.

It's an untested legal situation: EU claims authority (GDPR for European customers) AND US claims authority (various snooping acts binding for US companies even when working abroad). At least in public there's no resolution at this point in time.

In contrast to the US the EU does almost nothing to enforce their claimed authority.

I reached out to Mozilla, and they've confirmed that DoH is being enabled by default only for installations inside US.

So, if you are in the EU, Firefox won't switch you to DoH. You can still enable it if you wish, but your DNS queries will reach your local resolver unless you change it.

> I reached out to Mozilla, and they've confirmed that DoH is being enabled by default only for installations inside US.

How do they know? What is the likelihood of them getting it wrong?

What protections do they have in place for their geo-location, to ensure that they don't leak unnecessary information when determining whether a user is in the U.S. or not?

I was under the impression that it was people with "en_US" locale.

What if you're in UK/CA/AU/NZ and running that particular language variant instead of the "correct" one?

In EU the ISP are forced to use lying DNS to block websites.

In Czechia, ISPs are forced to block certain websites, but exact method is not speficied. Today, they just block it on DNS level, as that is simplest and effective enough (although easy to circumvent). If ordinary users were using DoH, then ISPs would be forced to use IP based blocking

This was one of the concerns brought up at the UKNOG panel:

Currently there is DNS blocking (e.g. gambling sites in Poland), and it handles most cases. If (too many?) people start circumventing that, will a government start insisting on more invasive measure (e.g., DPI)?

The government wrote a white paper about this because they proposed yet more blocking (for the whole anti-pornography thing where they want you to go buy a "pass" to look at porn) back in 2018.

The ISPs are not inclined to pay for DPI or whatever other nonsense, even if they believe it could be effective, which it probably can't be. Government does not want to take on a major budgetary extra to pay for something that's already unpopular. So that leaves it not getting done. Much hand-wringing.

The government already acknowledges that Tor completely defeats all existing attempts to censor the Network, but they supposed that DNS blocking is affordable and good enough. So, we make it no longer "good enough" and then too bad for their stupid policy.

AFAIK the piratebay block works at more than the DNS level. As in, navigating to the correct IP still gets you blocked.

Depends on the country. The Internet freedom index talks about what each country limits, not all do in any significant manner.

First, these things are generally country specific. Is there an EU Directive that makes it continent-wide?

Second, given countries in the EU are fairly democratic, this is done via acceptance of the voting public because they elected the representatives. They can always have the law changed if they don't like it.

Depends where in the EU. In the UK, DNS snooping by ISPs is universal, and in fact required by law under the pretext of blocking minors' access to porn.

> ... in fact required by law under the pretext of blocking minors' access to porn.

[citation needed]

Which law specifically? I was under the impression that this was currently being done voluntarily by the ISPs so that the government wouldn't start drafting legislation.

(I could be wrong; I just want a referenced/definitive answer either way.)

Digital Economy Act 2017

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2017/30/contents/enacted

The idea was, Porn sites need to obey UK government rules, if they /don't/ (and why would, for example, a Canadian porn site obey those rules?) then a censor (the BBFC that took on this role for video got that job) directs that ISPs should block the offending site using DNS blocks.

In practice it keeps getting pushed out because it's hopeless from all angles.

I wonder why PICS/POWDER never took off:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...

Self-labeling could then perhaps help third-party software filter things.

In most countries, including the EU.

If you have a laptop and configure your DNS automatically, you are using whatever DNS is configured by hotels, airports, coffee shops, etc. You have no privacy whatsoever when it comes to DNS requests and you have no control over this until you manually configure your DNS (which most users don't even know how to do). The default configuration of laptops is to use whatever they are told to use automatically. In most places the only safe assumption is that multiple nation states are actively monitoring and aggregating every single DNS request you make and the practical reality is that that is actually exactly what happens.

The sad reality is that ISPs in most places don't lift a finger to protect the privacy of their users and actively facilitate policing, censoring, and monitoring of their user's DNS traffic; even when they are not required to (which they are in most places). Your trust in them is completely misguided.

I live in Germany. I know that my ISP works with the German government to help them censor me accessing certain websites by blocking DNS. I also know that they collaborate with lawyers going after individual p2p users. And I know it has a history of serving advertisements on domains that don't resolve (something I opted out of years ago). I also know DNS traffic data is routinely shared between different nation states and that this practice has little or no oversight.

In so far they are not actively sharing data (which they are), they can also be relied apon to be generally incompetent when it comes to operating and securing their infrastructure and you'd have to assume that foreign intelligence agencies have been actively helping themselves to whatever information they can extract that way for decades.

If you are wondering, my ISP is O2. I'd switch but Germany has a state protected ISP oligarchy and the other ISPs are not really much better.

Mozilla protecting users from their privacy being violated like this by default is a net improvement in most places in the world. Anyone who cares about their privacy enough already configures their DNS manually and probably also uses a VPN and can continue to do so. But for those not capable of figuring this out, this is a massive improvement of their default level of privacy. The status quo for that is that they have none whatsoever in most places when it comes to DNS. It's hard to do worse than that.

> I know that my ISP works with the German government to help them censor me accessing certain websites by blocking DNS.

Citation on o2/Telekom/etc blocking domains?

> I also know that they collaborate with lawyers going after individual p2p users.

Kind of hard not to do if you're legally obliged. But not per se a privacy violation and not a matter of snooping on content.

> And I know it has a history of serving advertisements on domains that don't resolve (something I opted out of years ago).

> Ok but again not really a major privacy leak, just stupid/bad/user-hostile practice.

> I also know DNS traffic data is routinely shared between different nation states and that this practice has little or no oversight.

And who is the main party spying on/in Germany? Snowden leaks tells us the NSA, with active but idiotically unaware cooperation by the BND. So you're giving data directly to a US cloud provider instead.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany

Parties, plural. A better question would be who isn't spying. I live in Berlin. The Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, US, UK, Iranians, etc. all have big embassies here and there is a lot of diplomatic traffic and it of course features frequently in popular fiction on espionage. Also, there are lots of political refugees from all over the world living in Berlin. E.g. Ai Weiwei lives somewhere in my area and I've seen him on the street a couple of times. I live a kilometer away from the HQ of the German secret service.

I have no illusions about Cloudflare. However, unlike my ISP they are big, pretty competent, generally under a lot of scrutiny, and have a very big incentive to not get caught with their pants down contradicting what they say they do in their contracts, terms of use, etc. Not exactly ironclad, I know, but definitely a step up from O2's combination of indifference, incompetence and tendencies towards actively not caring one bit about their users privacy.

> and i can't understand why EU politics don't intervene

Maybe it is as simple as nobody having filed a complaint with a data protection agency yet.

Maybe because the rollout of DoH by default doesn't include the EU. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/24/mozilla_backtracks_...

It looks like they are exploring how to handle things in the EU and looking for partners there.

Interesting question... How would I file a complaint against Mozilla?

Their privacy policy is only available in English and lists Mozilla Corporation in Mountain View as the legal entity.

They probably don't conduct many business activities in the EU.

However, it looks like they are providing a website for "data subject access requests" which means they might fall under EU regulation as it sounds like a GDPR compliance thing.

https://app.onetrust.com/app/#/webform/4ba08202-2ede-4934-a8...

> > In practice ISPs are the almost universally reprehensible in how they collect, track, and sell your data

> ... in your country.

In my country, they are legally required to be reprehensible in those ways...

Yay Australia... :-/

(Where I'm pretty sure my VPN use puts me own a list. Another list...)

So I also live in EU and, regarding DNS, I trust NA way more than the ISP of my country.

Your local intelligence agency and local ads network can probably way more easily and legally look into the local DNS records of the same country than the records stored on another continent.

What's more, I don't mind the USA having my browsing habits because they can't easily use it against me, as EU is a different market.

It's all about splitting the data about yourself to different competing entities, rather than trusting only one entity with everything.

Yet you're still using online resources that are within the 5 eyes.

If you're in the EU then there is no concern since CF will only be used as a default provider in the US for US users using the US version of Firefox.

I've got some great news for you: firefox is only doing DoH in the US.

DoH is a vendor-neutral protocol. There are already many DNS providers beyond just Cloudflare offering it, and there's no reason that every existing DNS provider couldn't offer it in the future. DoH is simply DNS transmitted over a secure encrypted medium, whereas existing DNS is transmitted over an insecure unencrypted medium. It's very similar to HTTP vs HTTPS.

Somehow, groups that stand to gain a lot by continuing to be able to read and intercept DNS traffic have led a successful astroturfing campaign against DoH by conflating it with one specific implementation in Firefox that happens to use Cloudflare as default provider (though of course with the ability to choose other providers, as you can for search engine). This is not a good argument against DoH in general, for obvious reasons.

> DoH is a vendor-neutral protocol.

But there are still gaps regarding discovery of DoH servers.

> DoH is simply DNS transmitted over a secure encrypted medium, whereas existing DNS is transmitted over an insecure unencrypted medium.

I think you're confusing DoH and DoT.

> It's very similar to HTTP vs HTTPS.

No, it isn't.

1)It is common to HTTP-redirect to HTTPS, and none of the DoH proponents have proposed/standardised discovery of DoH, as far as I can tell.

2)DoH means that suddenly many "features" of HTTP infect DNS, such as cookies. The RFCs allow for cookies, the question is, what cookies does Mozilla send in DoH requests, and what does Cloudflare do with them?

> Somehow, groups that stand to gain a lot by continuing to be able to read and intercept DNS traffic have led a successful astroturfing campaign against DoH by conflating it with one specific implementation in Firefox that happens to use Cloudflare as default provider (though of course with the ability to choose other providers, as you can for search engine).

Not only "groups that stand to gain", but users who stand to lose more privacy by exposing their DNS requests to Cloudflare by default.

DoH may be good (I think DoT would be better), and surely Mozilla could do a better job of encouraging DoT and/or DoH support by working to get better discovery of DoH and/or DoT instead of forcing all DNS traffic (for users it has identified are in the U.S., and by the way, how does it do that without additional privacy concerns) to a (to me) un-trusted third party.

Actually, I think in my country, if they do this, Mozilla would fall afoul of traffic interception laws.

I don't want all my DNS requests to be sent to Cloudflare. I trust my ISP more than Cloudflare.

As for you claims about "astroturfing campaigns", — how do we know, that you aren't a part of one?

If I understand it right, the current rollout is US only.

I know some folks outside the US trust their ISP more than a US company. Right now it appears the rollout isn't hitting you unless you opt in. Mozilla recently clarified this to politicians in Britain [1]

US ISPs are all subject to NSL and the US gov the same way Cloudflare is.

What's different is privacy. When I'm at a coffee shop or some other place my DNS traffic is normally unencrypted. ISPs have gotten a reputation for doing shady monitoring. This doesn't stop all of it but removes a method to watch things.

For US folks the question becomes, do you trust Cloudflare under a special agreement negotiated with Mozilla with a goal of protecting privacy or do you trust your ISP and the ISPs of all the places you connect?

For folks outside the US I'd wonder if or when this would come to me.

If I'm incorrect on something please let me know. I'm just now learning about the reach and implications.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/24/mozilla_backtracks_...

I am not a US citizen, your practice isnt mine. That also goes for many here and many more of the people who use the internet. I cant trust a US company with my DNS requests because lacking US citizenship or residency I lack any rights or protection whatsoever when it comes to my data. For my local ISP on the other hand, there are clear rules and regulations in place on how they are allowed to use and share my data.

I would say i have more trust in my ISP but trust is not the issue here, its jurisdiction. Routing my DNS requests through another jurisdiction where i lack any rights or protection is just a horrible "screw you" to anyone not living in the US.

It might be the tinfoil, but looking at this move by Mozilla after disabling addons silently via an out of date cert a few month ago (screwing over every last Tor user in the process) I am hard pressed not to assume malice on their part.

DoH by default is only enabled for US right now. They have no plans for further rollouts as of now.

I did not know that, thank you very much for the heads up.

That means nothing.

Last year, it was only experiment. Next year, it might be rolled out for everyone.

Keep in mind that Cloudflare is US company. US government is infamous for secret subpoena and gag orders toward the US companies. Also US government is infamous for serious and illegal spying. They also holding known vulnerabilities information from public for greater good(for them).

Practically, no trust.

DoH to Cloudflare by default is only happening to US users. Their current DNS options via their ISP are also subject to the US government.

> DoH to Cloudflare by default is only happening to US users.

Not quite (as I understand things): it is for people with an "en_US" local.

If someone in the UK (or NZ, AU, CA) downloaded that particular language installer, then non-US residences can be hit by this.

There's also no trust with ISPs. They've already all lobbied at the Congressional level to legally sell our data. The NSA already captures/stores everything that comes out of any of their datacenters. So whose DNS do we use? A shitty company's, or another shitty company's?

>They've already all lobbied at the Congressional level to legally sell our data.

And succeeded! And even as they did it and succeeded, claimed that they didn't want or need that ability and /totally/ wouldn't take advantage of it if/when it did pass.

> There's also no trust with ISPs. They've already all lobbied at the Congressional level to legally sell our data.

Yes, for you Americans.

Please, go fix your politicians, rather than inflicting technical "solutions" to political problems on the rest of the world.

it's also a business. As soon as they find it advantageous to start selling that information, they will, and will ride on their reputation for privacy to make as much as possible from that information

Cloudflare and their servers are also based in a country where secret court orders can force CF to collect and stream out request logs, lie on their privacy policy, and force "third-party audits" to say everything is OK with basically zero checks and balances.

I don't give a triangular fuck if local ISP X is selling DNS statistics to marketing corp Y. If they're getting something useful from the 101 domains every web page load seems to contact nowadays, power to them. But I'm not okay with some shadowy alphabet-soup-esque mire of "public servants" building a profile about me from a conflagration of data sources, and using it against me when they feel like it.

> * In practice ISPs are the almost universally reprehensible in how they collect, track, and sell your data.*

This means it would be an enormous leap forward in privacy for vast amounts of people.

I never understood the “perfect or nothing” approach to security that manifests itself in circles of the tech elite. Football is won by getting 1st downs, not throwing touchdowns every time.

>I'd much rather trust Cloudflare than my ISP.

And I'd prefer a solution that does not rely on trusting any single entity, irrelevant of how "trustworthy" that entity is.

Your ISP can see the endpoints you are connecting to regardless. So you get a strict reduction in privacy.

Has cloudflare ever gone to court to fight an administrative subpoena? More than a few ISPs have.

DoH seems like fine technology. Tying it to cloudflare is kind of shocking, since many technologists have long suspected that cloudflare is regularly being used to intercept traffic.

Am I the only one who remembers "Cloudbleed"? I can't understand why people are so eager to trust Cloudflare with more and more of their HTTPS traffic.

I remember it very well and I've written and spoken about it extensively.

I would still wait for European DoH to be available (if ever). There's no way I'm sending my entire DNS traffic to the US or a US entity.

Actually, CZ.NIC (the .cz domain registry) runs one.

You can find it at https://odvr.nic.cz/doh.

It will always be configurable for people who deicide they don’t like the defaults, like it has been, currently is, and will be.

And it is still missing autoconfig mechanism, like the old DHCP DNS setting.

Nobody is going to manually reconfigure their resolver every time they change their network.

This would only be true if your ISP couldn't otherwise violate your privacy. Which they can. That they don't see your DNS requests is an extremely low barrier. They see all the subsequent traffic.

Using DoH increases your privacy attack surface, not reduces it.

No, I don't see that. Either way your subsequent unencrypted requests are visible. Your encrypted requests are not. DoH is strictly better.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not talking about the contents of the packets. I'm talking about the IP address destinations. You know -- the part that DNS tells you. The ISP has that info anyway as they transit the traffic for you.

DoH is strictly worse.

> I'm talking about the IP address destinations

That's true, that will leak either way.

> DoH is strictly worse.

Still waiting for your argument for how it's worse. The way I see it it's at the very least no worse, but in practice much better for most people. I have an open-mind on the subject, convince me.

I'm confused, because I've already presented my argument. Here it is again:

Hiding your DNS requests from the ISP is pointless. The ISP sees where your traffic is going. This the result of those DNS requests. It doesn't matter that they didn't see the actual DNS request; they see what the answer was. They know what sites (DNS addresses) you are visiting.

So sending your DNS requests to a 3rd party (multiple ones in the recent RR version proposed!) simply spreads wider the folks that can profile your traffic. As unrelated 3rd parties, those people would otherwise have had no idea where you, private citizen, were sending traffic. Now you have explicitly told them. You have given up privacy, not enhanced it.

Please keep in mind, I'm not arguing against DoH wholesale. Just that it is worse for privacy. The primary consensus argument in favor of DoH is about privacy, which is flat out wrong.

> They know what sites (DNS addresses) you are visiting.

This is false if you have ESNI enabled. They see what IP addresses, not what web sites you are visiting. ESNI isn't on by default yet, but it will be.

ESNI does not provide much real security, only obfuscation.

Besides, it is not going to make it (South Korea already blocks it and others will follow).

They see the destination IP you are connecting to, usually behind one IP is only one web site. ESNI doesn't matter unless you are connecting to a site on a shared host.

Usually one site behind ip since when?

> Practice > theory. Every time.

No it's not, that kind of attitude is how you end up with people trying to replace the DOM API with sed or awk. In practice there's quite a lot of DOM queries that can be replaced with awk until you need certain things that become very hard. Theory would have warned you about that from the beginning.

I don't even know where to start with this. The idea of using sed or awk instead of the DOM is ridiculous in both theory and practice.

All I'm saying is how things are in reality is more important than how things are in theory. I'm curious if you can find an instance where that's not true, but regardless it's a good rule of thumb.

How things are in practice matters, but there's risk that you're misreading the situation. Theory can speak not just to how you think it is, but also to how it might be - particularly in security, where hostile actors are trying to change how it is.

You can still set 1.1.1.1 as your DNS resolve in your DHCP server if you want to trust your ISP.

If enough people switch to DoH (as would be needed for DoH by default to have a measurable effect) and the data is even slightly valuable, unscrupulous ISPs could still use SNI, or even just reverse IP lookups to track your movements.

> You can still set 1.1.1.1 as your DNS resolve in your DHCP server if you want to trust your ISP.

It's not that I necessarily trust my ISP, I don't want to be forced to also trust Cloudflare (both for privacy and availability).

So no, I don't use 1.1.1.1, I run my own recursive name server.

That also works for avoiding your ISP serving your DNS requests.

I also run my own recursive resolver but this doesn't prevent snooping by the ISP as the recursive requests go through its network.

I just wrote a post yesterday about why you should not, in fact, trust cloudflare. https://www.jbschirtzinger.com/post/doh/

Well, you can only trust a third-party audit as much as you trust the third party auditor, which usually isn't very much. What good does it really do that company X, which I know very little about, said that Y does such and such?

> so you can have peace of mind about it

You can have peace of mind about it, but I can't.

And your ISP and coffee shop do regular audits? What are you doing for DNS that's so much better right now?

The quality of my ISP and coffee shops isn't relevant. I was talking about "peace of mind" when using Cloudflare, not about the alternatives. Even if Cloudflare is the best option, that doesn't automatically mean I can relax about it.

That said...

Coffee shops or other open WiFi APs don't enter into it, since I use my own VPN server when I'm out and about.

So you’re sending your traffic to some other cloud host or your ISP, his question still stands

His question is not relevant to my statement, though, so I answered it to the best of my ability without changing subjects: even if Cloudflare is the best available option, that does not mean I can have "peace of mind" about using it.

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