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Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree.

But the problem began decades ago when sysadmins started using firewalls to control what employees could access. During early 2000's I was involved in moving a lot of apps that used a bespoke port to port 80/443 just to make sure our apps and services didn't have any client hiccups due to (rightly so?) belligerent sysadmins.

All this has really done has made sysadmins lives harder bc of packet inspection. So, all app developers and now infrastructure solution devs must run thru 443, otherwise the take up wouldn't happen. The internet is effectively running on one port nowadays.

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> But the problem began decades ago when sysadmins started using firewalls to control what employees could access.

If the sysadmins were told "We don't want people doing X on company time: stop it.", that is hardly the sysadmins' fault.

Do you think IT / Helpdesk wants the drama of extra calls because certain things are blocked? That they're sitting in their cubicles twirling their sinister mustaches thinking of ways to make people's lives more difficult?

The Bastard Operator From Hell! :-)

Honestly, I've met a handful of IT bureaucrats who enjoyed the power trip of holding up dozens of people on a multimillion dollar project over an outdated policy.

These people are the exception, not the norm, but it only takes one.

> holding up ... over an outdated policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowdown#Rule-book_slowdown

When used carefully, it can be a very effective tactic.

I did a talk on this phenomenon once. It's a form of Red Queen's Race: admins block stuff, protocols not blocked grow to subsume blocked functionality, repeat.

In the end we will have a virtualized Internet 100% encrypted and tunneled over port 443, rendering the physical IP header worthless legacy baggage.

To IT admins: the more you tighten your grip, the more protocols will slip through your fingers.

It's the consequence of a design flaw on IP, because every information for consumption only of the final host should have been encrypted.

Nobody knew better at the time, but this time we know. Fortunately, it will end at HTTPS, and it's just a matter of optimizing it well enough (in HTTPS4, or 5, or how many it takes) to make it behave like an internet-level protocol and replace IP.

Early 2000's was also when email got encryption between a mail client and the server. Belligerent sysadmins may try to block all ports except 80 and 443, but users get a bit upset when 143, 993, 25 or 465 get blocked and mail stop working.

Why not extent the existing protocol and keep it on port 53, which DNS already uses?

Because some companies run with an effective

    iptables -t filter -A FORWARD -p udp --dport 53 -j DROP

And prevent anything from their own internal resolvers from accessing outside DNS services, especially now that encrypted SNI is moving more web filtering to the DNS layer.

But that one is OK. DNS over HTTPS doesn't exist to circumvent enterprise content filtering (hence why you can hint you don't want it to run with a DNS entry, making it vulnerable to downgrade attacks).

Easier to make the orgs internal recursive resolver "does the right thing" than all clients, too.

> DNS over HTTPS doesn't exist to circumvent enterprise content filtering

Replace "enterprise" with "ISP" or "nation state", and that's closer to what the DoH aims are.

Sure, if you have internal only sites, you pretty much have to, and this is used even in small and medium shops.

DOH will cause so much drama when internal sites wont resolve any more.

Its perfectly ok to let your internal sites be resolved outside your network? Abc.internal resolves to 192.168.0.101 is fine?

What's the risk?

How do you do PTR records? (what hostname is 10.12.43.122) How do you do split DNS? (Inside my network I want it pointing to my internal server)

Now you could argue that the fault in both of those cases is IPv4 and the natting that comes with it.

i don't get the ptr problem. My internal sites already have ptr records. My dns server sits facing the internet. Ptr records too.

But yes. If u have a domain that is supposed to resolve different depending on the source ip that'd be..interesting... Now u need a website that displays different content depending on source ip or something like that...

If your machine is pointing to doh on the Internet, how does a reverse lookup for an rfc1918 address work?

One issue with doh is that it’s inconsistent - some applications use one resolver, some use another. The network (via dhcp) can’t hint at which resolver to use.

i'd prefer not to. We work for a number of different clients, and its common to have pg11-clientanme.* and node-clientname.* ...

I have over 200 domains internally, that i don't have externally.

but its also flexibility. We often when we develop, want to redirect certain domains to our endpoints, for testing or whatever, and do that on DNS so that not everyone has to edit host files etc.

we have pfsense internally, with number of people that can and do add/remove hosts/domains on daily basis, but host our external DNS on CF, and only 2 people have access to that.

Middleboxes like to drop any data they don't understand. No doubt there is one out there that is checking that all data on the dns port looks like dns and when encrypted dns is used it gets dropped. Using https for everything means middleboxes can't tell what is going on and just allow it.

DNSCurve is specifically designed to look like UDP DNS. The problem isn't that the packets don't validate as DNS, it's that some of the middleboxes modify them, or don't send them to the appropriate server at all and try to answer the query themselves. The protocol then detects that MitM attack and rejects the response -- as well it should, but detecting the attack doesn't get you to working DNS.

HTTPS can't save you from that, though, because the same networks that modify DNS queries to third party DNS servers also do things like require you to install a root certificate and then MitM your TLS connections, and drop connections that don't accept their root certificate.

In both cases it's the same thing. You can detect the attack but that doesn't get you through.

Because some totaliterian governments block illegal web sites like wikipedia.org

My home ISP, for example, will replace anything you request on port 53 by their DNS results, with ads and sites blocked by incompetence.

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