[dns-operations] ODNS: Oblivious DNS

[Yonghua Peng]

https://odns.cs.princeton.edu/

It is well known that DNS leaks information that an Internet user may 
want to keep private, such as the websites she is visiting, user 
identifiers, MAC addresses, and the subnet in which she is located. This 
information can be visible to a 3rd party eavesdropping on the 
communication between a client and a recursive resolver, or even between 
a recursive resolver and an authoritative server. As this information is 
sent to each DNS server, DNS operators can also see clients’ information.

While there has been some previous work on increasing privacy in DNS 
infrastructure, such as DNS Query Name Minimization and DNS-Over-TLS, 
these approaches do not fully solve the problem. Both of these are steps 
in the right direction, but neither prevent DNS operators from learning 
information which domains specific users are interested in. Our work is 
concerned with a powerful adversary that has the capabilities to: 1) 
eavesdrop on communications between clients and recursive resolvers, and 
between recursive resolvers and authoritative name servers, 2) request 
data (via subpoena/warrant) from any number of DNS operators, 3) 
maliciously access data at any DNS server.

To address this type of attacker, we present Oblivious DNS (ODNS), which 
is a new design of the DNS ecosystem that allows current DNS servers to 
remain unchanged and increases privacy for data in motion and at rest. 
In the ODNS system, both the client is modified with a local resolver, 
and there is a new authoritative name server for .odns. To prevent an 
eavesdropper from learning information, the DNS query must be encrypted; 
the client generates a request for www.foo.com, generates a session key 
k, encrypts the requested domain, and appends the TLD domain .odns, 
resulting in {www.foo.com}k.odns. The client forwards this, with the 
session key encrypted under the .odns authoritative server’s public key 
({k}PK) in the “Additional Information” record of the DNS query to the 
recursive resolver, which then forwards it to the authoritative name 
server for .odns. The authoritative server decrypts the session key with 
his private key, and then subsequently decrypts the requested domain 
with the session key. The authoritative server then forwards the DNS 
request to the appropriate name server, acting as a recursive resolver. 
While the name servers see incoming DNS requests, they do not know which 
clients they are coming from; additionally, an eavesdropper cannot 
connect a client with her corresponding DNS queries.