Oblivious DNS: Practical privacy for DNS queries: Published in PoPETS 2019

Virtually every Internet communication typically involves a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup for the destination server that the client wants to communicate with. Operators of DNS recursive resolvers - the machines that receive a client's query for a domain name and resolve it to a corresponding IP address - can learn significant information about client activity. Recognizing the privacy vulnerabilities associated with DNS queries, various third parties have created alternate DNS services that obscure a user's DNS queries from his or her Internet service provider. Yet, these systems merely transfer trust to a different third party. We argue that no single party ought to be able to associate DNS queries with a client IP address that issues those queries. To this end, we present Oblivious DNS (ODNS), which introduces an additional layer of obfuscation between clients and their queries. To do so, ODNS uses its own authoritative namespace; the authoritative servers for the ODNS namespace act as recursive resolvers for the DNS queries that they receive, but they never see the IP addresses for the clients that initiated these queries. Our experiments using a prototype show that ODNS introduces minimal performance overhead, both for individual queries and for web page loads. Critically, we design ODNS to be compatible with existing DNS infrastructure.