Keynote Talk at AFRICOMM 2020 on DNS Privacy

Professor Feamster gave a keynote to AFRICOMM 2020 today entitled “The Past, Present, and Future of DNS Privacy”.

The talk covered the research group’s work on DNS over the past five years, including:

• The privacy risks associated with DNS, including the fact that DNS can be used to infer Web browsing behavior and even human activities in a smart home.
• The recent and ongoing trends towards the encryption and centralization of DNS, in particular the increasing deployment of encrypted DNS in browsers, including Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
• Our ongoing efforts to reduce the privacy risks of DNS, including the deployment of Oblivious DNS (ODNS) and (Re)Decentralized DNS (D-DNS).

The Q&A offered many interesting questions concerning the performance and privacy implications of DNS deployment in Africa.

Oblvious DNS decouples DNS queries and responses from the IP address/identity of the client issuing the DNS request. ODNS, invented by Nick Feamster and Paul Schmitt, is now being standardized by Apple and deployed by Cloudflare.

In short, the performance and privacy of Encrypted DNS in Africa will ultimately depend on having an extensive, diverse, distributed set of trusted recursive resolvers across the continent, for several reasons, as we discussed in the Q&A:

• ODNS imposes a performance cost on DNS lookups, roughly equivalent to the network latency between the normal DNS recursive resolver and the authoritative ODNS server. Thus, the ability to reap…