DoHoT: making practical use of DNS over HTTPS over Tor

9 min readJul 3, 2020

This is the first document for a new project called DoHoT DNS, which I hope will grow to help people recoup some privacy in places where they have previously not considered it lacking.

Note for Medium.COM readers: the master copy of this essay can always be found at https://github.com/alecmuffett/dohot

TL;DR

I set up a DNS stub resolver using DNS over HTTPS over Tor at home. For four months — during the UK COVID-19 lockdown / shelter-in-place — my partner and I have lived with it exclusively. It has worked so well that we haven’t noticed any practical change in our internet service experience.

Goals

What I seek with this project is to explain, to encourage, and to simplify adoption of DNS over HTTPS over Tor.

Disclaimers

Likely none of this is new.
I probably describe nothing that is novel.
Other people will have done this before, and are probably doing it now, although arguably from a base of less experience than myself regarding Tor and performance tuning.
None of the software I describe has been written by me, but instead has been written by people cleverer and more dedicated than I.
DNS experts will almost certainly describe the latency figures that I publish here as “excessively slow”, “impractical”, or “unusable”. I firmly disagree, at least for the domestic or individual user, and I present several months’ worth of both numbers and “24x7 lived experience” to back up my perspective.

The Experiment

For more than four months my home — excluding a small extranet — has gone utterly “DNS Dark”, so that absolutely no Do53 traditional UDP or TCP DNS traffic has come from my house.

This has been during the period of the COVID-19 “lockdown” so my domestic network use has greatly increased in this time: streaming Netflix & Amazon Prime, work videoconferencing over Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, home banking, shopping, family video over Facebook Portal, etc; desktops, laptops, mobile devices, tablets, IoT… the internet has been a critical resource for life, and yet no traditional DNS traffic has left my home since February.

To fulfil the actual need for IP address resolution, I set up a Raspberry Pi as a home DNS server — in much the same manner that I have previously operated a Pi-Hole Ad-Blocker — except on this occasion:

I configured a dnscrypt-proxy resolver listening to port 53
set the resolver to exclusively use DoH for upstream resolution
configured DoH to use only the SOCKS5 interface provided by a local tor daemon
advertised that resolver using DHCP on my home network, and finally…
set my firewall to block all network egress to ports 53 & 853, TCP & UDP (except for permitting the resolver itself to have just enough port 53 access to bootstrap)

Experiment Results Summary

Almost all of the documentation that I have read — including some amongst the dnscrypt-proxy source code - has told me that DoHoT would be laggy, unlivably slow, and a bad idea. I cannot agree. Although DNS-query latency figures have been somewhat inflated, my actual experience of internet usage has been "business as usual".

It’s helpful that every four hours dnscrypt-proxy prints a summary of upstream request latency amongst the loadbalanced pool of resolvers that it is using, and I shall present the statistics for the entirety of June 2020, plus a little bit of May and July.

The headline stats are:

measured lowest latencies over june 2020

a pool of 3 DoH providers for the initial experiment: A, B, and C
196 data points from May 31st to July 2nd
p50 / median request lowest-latency: 193ms
p90 request lowest-latency: 372ms
p95 request lowest-latency: 425ms
max request lowest-latency: 815ms

Manual spot-testing from my extranet suggests that resolution of .com names that are not in my ISP's upstream resolver cache will take 140 to 170ms to be resolved via Do53, and that resolution of a domain in .cn can take 670ms. These numbers are ad-hoc, but I find it reassuring that the best-case times for DoHoT are in the same ballpark as survivable normal/worst-case times for Do53.

Why DoHoT?

The DNS protocol is more than 40 years old, was never designed for privacy, and is broadly instrumented — i.e.: logged, sold, spied-upon, and interfered-with — by:

Cafes, Hotels, Aircraft, and other “captive portals”
Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
The upstream peers and bearer-providers for ISPs
Partner-companies to the above, which monetise the ability to control, manipulate and track DNS results
Nation-state Governments which want to exert control upon peoples’ access to information

As I have written elsewhere the launch of the DoH protocol presents a marvellous opportunity; the protocol itself has been represented as rather contentious but a careful reading of some of the more critical coverage suggests that the criticisms tend to come from people or organisations in categories 2 through 5 above, perhaps concerned that increased DNS privacy may impact their business models, revenue, income, or their quiet "obligations" to nation-state security services. as if people being enabled with privacy would somehow be "their fault".

DoH as an Opportunity

Some critics ignore the “first mile” transport-security benefits of DoH and instead frame the concerns by complaining about problems that DoH doesn't actually address; for instance:

ZDnet article:
The response to DoH’s anointment as a major privacy-preserving solution has been downright acid, in some cases. Critics have taken a jab at the protocol on different plains, which we’ll try to organize and categorize below:
DoH doesn’t actually prevent ISPs user tracking
DoH creates havoc in the enterprise sector
DoH weakens cyber-security
DoH helps criminals
DoH shouldn’t be recommended to dissidents
DoH centralizes DNS traffic at a few DoH resolvers

The cited criticisms are not reasonable because the concerns that are raised are generally not for DoH to fix:

“DoH doesn’t actually prevent ISPs user tracking”

DoH was never meant as a wholesale "cure" for ISP user-tracking; it's meant to reduce DNS observation, tampering, and interference.

“DoH creates havoc in the enterprise sector”

I have worked in the “enterprise sector” since 1992; I am sorry to be glib but this equally glib claim is nonsense.

“DoH weakens cyber-security”

Again this is a vague concern — DoH weakens what aspects of security, how, for whom, and to what compensating benefits, to whom? — but also it should be noted that the prime weaknesses in cybersecurity are “users” and “software” yet we are somehow content to have more of both of those?

“DoH helps criminals”

Helps criminals? So does “the internet” in general — it would not be able to have cybercrime without computers.

“DoH shouldn’t be recommended to dissidents”

So far as I am aware, nobody is recommending DoH for "dissidents"; DoH is being recommended more broadly to people who want more privacy.

“DoH centralizes DNS traffic at a few DoH resolvers”

Aha! This latter concern has some substance, and it is worth consideration; generally there are three aspects to this concern:

“DNS is a ‘distributed’ protocol, and DoH is antithetical to 'distribution'!".

I deal with this matter extensively in a separate blogpost

“There are not enough DoH providers and users may be deanonymised via analysis of huge data sets!"

Mozilla has sought to address this concern with their Trusted Recursive Resolver program; but simplistically it seems logical that the proper solution to “too few” DoH providers is to encourage more of them, not fewer.

“A small number of Big Data Companies will get all the tracking information, instead of us!”

This is an actionable concern, and one where we can make an improvement well beyond DoH let alone Do53. The fear that “Big Data Companies” will mine DoH request data for profit is valid and is one which the likes of (e.g.) Mozilla are already working on (see point 2, here) - but it's one where the internet is also already equipped with a well-tested solution: Tor.

Why Tor, and why use DoH over Tor?

One of the goals of the Tor project is to provide anonymity of clients from servers; there are other benefits to Tor and Tor “Onion Networking”, but this is the most popular rationale for Tor’s use.

It’s also a rationale which meshes insanely well, with DoH.

Tor does not support UDP and therefore cannot provide anonymity for Do53 traffic, but because DoH is normal HTTPS it can be carried efficiently over Tor connections.

Therefore:

if the individual provides and controls a local Do53 resolver, not least for normal, "legacy" use - being offered by DHCP, etc.
and that resolver is configured to resolve upstream, using DoH
and that resolver is configured to strip linkable identifiers from DoH requests
and that resolver connects to various major DoH providers over Tor
then the provider will not know who is making the request, nor from where it came, nor will be able to “link” requests

This architecture follows Tor’s “anonymity loves company” model for privacy, and offers far better privacy, integrity, unblockability and untrackability than anything offered by Do53, DoT (DNS over TLS on port 853), raw DoH or indeed any other DNS lookup-service.

And the technology already exists, is free, and my data and experience is that it works really well for home users, perhaps more.

How do I build a DoHoT server?

See here; this project is project evolving and I will be updating it.

Surely there have been some issues?

There are a few patterns or weird experiences that I have noted:

The Ubiquity WiFi dashboard will complain about “latency”, indefinitely

My WiFi router dashboard perpetually complains about “High DNS Latency”, which only goes to show that expectations of “low latency” in modern DNS are lower than what humans are actually okay with.

Chromecast honours DHCP’s DoHoT DNS server, but also tries to use 8.8.8.8

Approximately every 20 seconds my Chromecast attempts to send a request to 8.8.8.8, which my firewall drops and logs. I find this interesting, but it’s not really a DoHoT problem so much as a matter of my choice to block any non-DoHoT DNS requests.

The Chromecast — including upgrades — still works fine, so I am ignoring this matter.

“Human Error” is surprisingly common

Every so often I visit somewhere that causes me to temporarily hardcode my laptop or phone DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8; then I come home and the device stops working until I remember to reset the DNS to be the automatic DHCP default.

Again I consider this to be due to my choice to block any non-DoHoT DNS requests, but it’s probably also good discipline from a privacy perspective. I actually used to believe that my privacy self-discipline was better than this, but I was wrong.

This situation is interesting to compare to criticism from DoH critics who argue that it is they — your service provider, your ISP — rather than you, who should be limiting access to alternative sources of DNS resolution.

Absolutely nothing at home is using Port 853

DoT / DNS-over-TLS on port 853 is touted by DNS experts as the "proper" solution for DNS privacy and security, but I have not yet seen any devices or applications actually using it.

Footnotes and FAQs

Why are you only publishing 4 weeks’ worth of graphs?

I set this up in early February, and then COVID-19 happened, and I basically forgot about it; however my server does retain slightly more than 4 weeks worth of logs. I will try to do better in future.

Why are you not annotating the DoH providers?

To do so would not seem relevant; after some advanced technical experimentation with DoH and EOTK I simply picked three ordinary DoH providers and set them up as resolvers in DNSCrypt-Proxy.

Since the whole point of using Tor is to divorce the server from the client, I believe that — especially given the automatic load-balancing of DNSCrypt-Proxy — so long as the results appear consistent it doesn’t really matter who won the race to give the first response; so why risk being seen to pick favourites?

Did the latency drop significantly around June 6th?

Looking at the graph above, I noticed that “cliff edge” too. I’m not sure, but after checking with some members of the Tor project, some newer, faster Tor infrastructure may have become more prevalent around that time. Another member of the Tor community reminded me that it may be that my Tor instance changed “guard” to a faster one.