31 October 2019 to 1 November 2019 AGM
JW Marriott Austin
America/Winnipeg timezone
OARC31 Presentation Videos available at https://youtube.com/DNS-OARC

Analyzing the Costs (and Benefits) of DNS, DoT, and DoH for the Modern Web

31 Oct 2019, 14:00
30m
Griffin Hall (JW Marriott Austin)

Griffin Hall

JW Marriott Austin

110 E 2nd St Austin TX 78701 USA
No longer available: Standard Presentation Public Workshop

Speaker

Austin Hounsel (Princeton University)

Description

Essentially all Internet communication relies on the Domain Name System (DNS), which first maps a human-readable Internet destination or service to an IP address before two endpoints establish a connection to exchange data.
Today, most DNS queries and responses are transmitted in cleartext, making them vulnerable to eavesdroppers and traffic analysis.
Past work has demonstrated that DNS queries can reveal everything from browsing activity to user activity in a smart home.
To mitigate some of these privacy risks, two new protocols have been proposed: DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT). Rather than sending queries and responses as cleartext, these protocols establish encrypted tunnels between clients and resolvers.
This fundamental architectural change has implications for the performance of DNS, as well as for content delivery.

We measure the effect of DoH and DoT on name resolution performance and content delivery.
We find that although DoH and DoT response times can be higher than for conventional DNS (Do53), DoT can perform better than both protocols in terms of page load times, and DoH can at best perform indistinguishably from Do53.
However, when network conditions degrade, webpages load quickest with Do53, with a median of almost 0.5 seconds faster compared to DoH.
Furthermore, in a substantial amount of cases, a webpage may not load at all with DoH, while it loads successfully with DoT and Do53.
Our in-depth analysis reveals various opportunities to readily improve DNS performance, for example through opportunistic partial responses and wire format caching.

Talk Duration Lightning Talk 10 Minutes

Primary authors

Austin Hounsel (Princeton University) Dr Kevin Borgolte (Princeton University) Dr Paul Schmitt (Princeton University) Jordan Holland (Princeton University) Prof. Nick Feamster (University of Chicago)

Presentation materials