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Pretty Bad Privacy: Pitfalls of DNS Encryption

Published: 03 November 2014 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    As awareness for privacy of Domain Name System (DNS) is increasing, a number of mechanisms for encryption of DNS packets were proposed. We study the prominent defences, focusing on the privacy guarantees, interoperability with the DNS infrastructure, and the efficiency overhead. In particular:
    •We explore dependencies in DNS and show techniques that utilise side channel leaks, due to transitive trust, allowing to infer information about the target domain in an encrypted DNS packet.
    •We examine common DNS servers configurations and show that the proposals are expected to encounter deployment obstacles with (at least) 38% of 50K-top Alexa domains and (at least) 12% of the top-level domains (TLDs), and will disrupt the DNS functionality and availability for clients.
    •We show that due to the non-interoperability with the caches, the proposals for end-to-end encryption may have a prohibitive traffic overhead on the name servers.
    Our work indicates that further study may be required to adjust the proposals to stand up to their security guarantees, and to make them suitable for the common servers' configurations in the DNS infrastructure. Our study is based on collection and analysis of the DNS traffic of 50K-top Alexa domains and 568 TLDs.

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    1. Pretty Bad Privacy: Pitfalls of DNS Encryption

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WPES '14: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
      November 2014
      218 pages
      ISBN:9781450331487
      DOI:10.1145/2665943
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 03 November 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. dns
      2. dns caching
      3. dns encryption
      4. dns infrastructure
      5. dns privacy
      6. dns security
      7. side channel attacks
      8. transitive trust dependencies

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      WPES '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 67 submissions, 39%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 106 of 355 submissions, 30%

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      • (2023)PACLASS: A Lightweight Classification Framework on DNS-Over-HTTPSICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC45041.2023.10279398(3805-3810)Online publication date: 28-May-2023
      • (2022)Inline Traffic Analysis Attacks on DNS over HTTPS2022 IEEE 47th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN53696.2022.9843593(132-139)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
      • (2022)Hide and Seek: Revisiting DNS-based User Tracking2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00020(188-205)Online publication date: Jun-2022
      • (2022)Summary of DNS Over HTTPS AbuseIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.317549710(54668-54680)Online publication date: 2022
      • (2021)From IP to transport and beyondProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472933(836-849)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
      • (2021)DePL: Detecting Privacy Leakage in DNS-over-HTTPS Traffic2021 IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom53373.2021.00088(577-586)Online publication date: Oct-2021
      • (2021)DNSonChain: Delegating Privacy-Preserved DNS Resolution to Blockchain2021 IEEE 29th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP52444.2021.9651951(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2021
      • (2021)Privacy in the Cloud: A Survey of Existing Solutions and Research ChallengesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30495999(10473-10497)Online publication date: 2021
      • (2021)Domain name system security and privacy: A contemporary surveyComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2020.107699185(107699)Online publication date: Feb-2021
      • (2020)Assessing the Privacy Benefits of Domain Name EncryptionProceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3320269.3384728(290-304)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2020
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