An End-to-End, Large-Scale Measurement of DNS-over-Encryption: How Far Have We Come? Chaoyi Lu1;2, Baojun Liu3, Zhou Li4, Shuang Hao5, Haixin Duan1;2;6, Mingming Zhang1, Chunying Leng1, Ying Liu1, Zaifeng Zhang7 and Jianping Wu1 1Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University 2Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University 3Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University 4University of California, Irvine 5University of Texas at Dallas 6Qi An Xin Technology Research Institute 7360 Netlab ABSTRACT KEYWORDS DNS packets are designed to travel in unencrypted form through Domane Name System, DNS Privacy, DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over- the Internet based on its initial standard. Recent discoveries show HTTPS, DNS Measurement that real-world adversaries are actively exploiting this design vul- nerability to compromise Internet users’ security and privacy. To ACM Reference Format: Chaoyi Lu1;2, Baojun Liu3, Zhou Li4, Shuang Hao5, Haixin Duan1;2;6, mitigate such threats, several protocols have been proposed to en- Mingming Zhang1, Chunying Leng1, Ying Liu1, Zaifeng Zhang7 and Jian- crypt DNS queries between DNS clients and servers, which we ping Wu1. 2019. An End-to-End, Large-Scale Measurement of DNS-over- jointly term as DNS-over-Encryption. While some proposals have Encryption: How Far Have We Come?. In Internet Measurement Conference been standardized and are gaining strong support from the industry, (IMC ’19), October 21–23, 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands. ACM, New York, little has been done to understand their status from the view of NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355580 global users. This paper performs by far the first end-to-end and large-scale analysis on DNS-over-Encryption. By collecting data from Internet 1 INTRODUCTION scanning, user-end measurement and passive monitoring logs, we Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the fundamental building have gained several unique insights. In general, the service quality blocks of the Internet, mapping a user-friendly domain name to of DNS-over-Encryption is satisfying, in terms of accessibility and numerical IP addresses. According to its initial IETF standard, DNS latency. For DNS clients, DNS-over-Encryption queries are less packets are transmitted over UDP protocol in clear-text. Therefore, likely to be disrupted by in-path interception compared to tradi- communication integrity and confidentiality are absent. Unfor- tional DNS, and the extra overhead is tolerable. However, we also tunately, this design makes DNS communications vulnerable to discover several issues regarding how the services are operated. attacks like eavesdropping and tampering [29]. In fact, real-world As an example, we find 25% DNS-over-TLS service providers use adversaries have been exploiting DNS to harm Internet users. As invalid SSL certificates. Compared to traditional DNS, DNS-over- an example, released secret documents show that NSA has been Encryption is used by far fewer users but we have witnessed a covertly monitoring and hijacking DNS traffic, under the MoreCow- growing trend. As such, we believe the community should push Bell [44] and QuantumDNS [12] projects. A recent study also shows broader adoption of DNS-over-Encryption and we also suggest the that network middleboxes are actively intercepting DNS packets service providers carefully review their implementations. and rerouting them to alternative resolvers [60]. One of the mainstream approaches to mitigating such threat is CCS CONCEPTS to encrypt DNS communications. To this end, various techniques are proposed, including DNS-over-TLS (DoT), DNS-over-HTTPS • Networks → Application layer protocols; Network mea- (DoH), DNS-over-QUIC and DNSCrypt. In this paper, we jointly surement; Naming and addressing. term them as DNS-over-Encryption (DoE). Although most of the protocols have only been established for a few years, some have been gaining strong support from large DNS service providers [2, Haixin Duan and Ying Liu are the corresponding authors. 4, 14], OS [24, 56] and software [6, 38, 63]. This work is done during Chaoyi Lu’s research internship at 360 Netlab. However, despite the “top-down” effort made by the industry, little has been done to understand the operational status of DNS- over-Encryption from the “bottom-up” view, or from the view of 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 Internet users. In this paper, we aim to give a comprehensive and for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation end-to-end review of DNS-over-Encryption, which we believe will on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the provide good guidance in pushing the adoption and improving author(s) 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 the ecosystem of DNS-over-Encryption in the future. The research and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. questions we seek to answer include: 1) How many providers are IMC ’19, October 21–23, 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands offering DNS-over-Encryption services? Are their implementations © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6948-0/19/10...$15.00 secure? 2) What does their performance look like for users dis- https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355580 tributed globally? Is there any issue preventing access or causing IMC ’19, October 21–23, 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands Chaoyi Lu et al. errors? 3) What does the real-world usage of DNS-over-Encryption view in terms of user base, but on the other hand, the first DNS- look like? over-Encryption protocol has been established for around 10 years, Our Study. So far, DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS and many resolvers including Google and Cloudflare have started (DoH) are two standardized and extensively supported protocols to to run DNS-over-Encryption services. We believe it is necessary secure the traditional DNS, and our study focuses on measuring to understand the gap between the deployment and user adoption, the two protocols. First, we perform a comparative study on the and identify success and pitfalls of different protocols. Such effort DNS-over-Encryption protocols to outline their strengths and weak- can help the community to adjust the roadmap for the better future nesses (Section 2). Second, we launch Internet-wide scanning to of DNS-over-Encryption. To this end, we also publish our collected discover DNS-over-Encryption service providers and analyze their data and results to help further studies, and will continue to monitor security issues (Section 3). Third, we assess the accessibility and the ecosystem. performance of DNS-over-Encryption services by recruiting geo- Contributions. The contributions of this paper are outlined as graphically distributed vantage points (Section 4). Getting access follows. to real-world DNS-over-Encryption traffic from massive vantage ● Comparative study. Using 10 criteria under 5 categories, we present points without violating participants’ privacy is challenging. We the first comparative study on five DNS-over-Encryption proto- address this challenge by running controlled experiments on a care- cols, which sheds light on the development of the ecosystem. fully designed Internet measurement platform. Finally, we compare ● Methodology. Combining a suite of techniques, we design and the traffic volume between traditional DNS requests and DNS-over- deploy a large-scale measurement platform with 122,991 vantage Encryption requests using several large-scale datasets, including points in 166 countries, to understand the client-side usability of passive DNS datasets and 18-month NetFlow data from a large ISP DNS-over-Encryption services. Meanwhile, we launch Internet- (Section 5). wide scanning to discover new service providers. Findings. So far, we have obtained some unique discoveries about ● Observations. Leveraging several large-scale datasets, we investi- the deployment of DNS-over-Encryption. On one hand, the service gate the current deployment and usage of DNS-over-Encryption. quality of DNS-over-Encryption providers is satisfying in general, With multi-faceted insights, we provide concrete recommenda- suggesting the industry is prepared for large-scale real-world usage. tions to the DNS community. On the other hand, we also spot misconfigurations on some services, ● Dataset release. We are continuously collecting data and measur- and more efforts should be made to push its correct adoption. Below, ing the development of DNS-over-Encryption. We release our we highlight the key findings. datasets for public use at https://dnsencryption.info. ● We discover over 150 DoT and 17 DoH providers that offer DNS- over-Encryption services to client users with over 1.5K addresses. 2 BACKGROUND Interestingly, a lot of them do not show up in public resolver In this section, we first describe the privacy considerations regard- lists. However, 25% DoT providers, including large ones (Perfect ing DNS. We then elaborate and perform a comparative study on Privacy), use invalid SSL certificates which could break the server current protocols to encrypt DNS communications. authentication process. Particularly, TLS inspection devices are found to act as DoT proxies. In addition, we find that Quad9 2.1 DNS Privacy Considerations DoH has a misconfiguration which causes DNS lookup errors. DNS precedes almost all Internet activities: email senders look up We have reported the issue to the provider. recipients’ server addresses; patients query hospital domain names; ● Compared to traditional DNS, the reachability to DNS-over- devices use DNS to discover each other. By design, DNS packets Encryption servers turns to be better, with only less than 1% are sent in clear-text, which makes it vulnerable to both passive global clients experiencing service disruption.