Hi,

Christian makes a very good point about distributing the DNS query cache out of 
the recursive resolver into the clients, which is a privacy boon.  However, 
that comes at the cost of increased load on the authoritative servers as that 
collective recursive resolver cache is not standing between the clients and the 
auth servers.

I think that this is trade off that individuals and organisations could decide. 
 I imagine that organisations (work places etc.) would likely choose to use a 
recursive resolver, but private individuals may choose the recursive client 
option.  Whatever the case, I think it is valuable to facilitate that option 
being easily available.

Regards,
  Hugo Connery

________________________________________
From: dns-privacy [[email protected]] on behalf of Christian Huitema 
[[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, 8 September 2018 06:50
To: Brian Haberman; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [dns-privacy] Resolver to authoritative discussion guidance

[snip intro].

I am interested in the "no resolver" aspect. The privacy argument for
using encrypted to a recursive resolver is that the stub's queries get
mixed into an "anonymity set" of all the stubs using the same recursive
resolver. That's a fine argument, but it requires users to put a lot of
trust in the recursive resolvers. Clients would not be forced to trust
the recursive resolvers if they could do the entire recursion themselves.

Of course, running a recursive resolver from the client itself is not
currently a good privacy option. The client would end up sending lots of
clear text traffic to authoritative sites, traffic that could easily be
monitored. But if that traffic was encrypted, the "recursive client"
option would become significantly more attractive. Yes, the IP addresses
of the authoritative servers will be visible. But these servers have an
"anonymity set" of their own, as they often serve a large number of
domains. The adversaries will know that the user contacted a server, but
they will not know which domain on that server.

The recursive client option has the advantage of diluting the client's
requests over a multiplicity of servers. This makes the privacy of the
system significantly more robust. Recursive servers are interesting
targets, and adversaries can compel their cooperation through subpoena
or scarlet letters, or they can target them for hacking. With a
recursive client approach, the adversaries will have to gain cooperation
of a large number of servers, which may well be located in a variety of
jurisdictions. This could be much harder.

And because of that, I am quite interested in practical ways to encrypt
the traffic from clients to authoritative servers.

-- Christian Huitema

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