Explainer

DNS helps a browser find the address associated with a website name. Oblivious DNS over HTTPS adds a proxy and encryption so that the proxy and resolver each see only part of the lookup. That separation improves privacy when the services do not combine their knowledge, but it does not make every part of browsing anonymous.

The key ideas

  • DNS resolves names to addresses.
  • ODoH separates query contents from the client address.
  • Its privacy protection has a defined scope.

Explore the subject

Original recording: TikTok, 2020-12-09.

Video transcript

Read the original recording’s transcript

Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.

The internet is not as secure as you think. However, there is hope. So currently, when you visit a website, your browser first connects to a DNS that is either ran from your internet provider or from a company like Google. So the DNS resolver then directs your browser to a server's IP address where the website is hosted, leaving two critical problems with this fundamental mechanism. The first is that DNS queries and responses are unencrypted. The second is whoever your DNS provider is, despite your best efforts outside of using VPNs, they can still see what you are

looking at and build a comprehensive profile on what you are doing. In an article from Ars Technica, engineers from Cloudflare, Fastly, and Apple are working on a method called Oblivious DNS, abbreviated ODOH, which attempts to fix this with encryption and placing a network proxy between end users, guaranteeing that only the user has access to both the DNS request and the IP address that sends and receives it.