Not Someobody Else's Problem - Mine.

Writing, thoughts, experiences and perspectives of Abhas Abhinav.

Public DNS servers and Privacy

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Recently, CloudFare launched a public DNS service that they position as a “privacy-first Consumer DNS service”. And that got me thinking about how much information and data we are leaking through DNS queries and what that does to our privacy.

What are DNS resolvers?

DNS resolvers are network services that convert domain names into IP addresses. When you visit a website or send an email, all these applications need to map the name you use to its corresponding IP address. The operating system hands over this job to a DNS resolver which in turn uses other DNS servers to help do this mapping as quickly as possible.

In most home network settings, the DNS resolver is usually provided by the Internet Service Provider. Your phone or laptop or any other network device at home will use this  ISP DNS resolver to map names to IP addresses. Most organisational networks have local resolvers that then contact ISP or public DNS servers on the Internet.

In all cases, another function that DNS resolvers perform is that of caching the DNS name to IP mapping. By doing this, it can respond to DNS queries faster the next time the same resolution is requested by a machine on the network.

Self-hosted DNS Resolvers

One of the earliest things I did (as did many other people) was to host the DNS resolver locally on a network. In fact, for many years, I used to run a DNS resolver on my own laptop and used it to resolve (and cache) names to IP mappings locally. I also always ran a DNS resolver on the network (in our office, for example) for use by other network clients.

The primary reason for doing this was to control the process of DNS resolution and also place this resolver very close to the user to provide the best possible DNS resolution and caching performance. Another reason was that ISP DNS servers were not always reliable and could also perform badly under load. Additionally, if there were a lot of machines on the local network, then sending all this traffic over to the ISP would actually add a delay to the DNS resolution process (and hence to the users’ Internet usage experience).

The DNS resolver that we used to setup (and still do in so many cases) is called dnscache. Written by Dan Bernstein, it is extremely secure, simple, lightweight yet powerful toolset that do almost everything related to DNS serving and resolution.

Using Google DNS

Sometime in 2009, Google launched a public DNS service called Google Public DNS. Their idea was to offer a fast, reliable and secure DNS service that all sorts of consumers could use for DNS resolution. Hence, if users chose to use Google Public DNS, then they wouldn’t have to setup a local DNS or use their ISP’s. All DNS requests would go to Google’s servers and Google would route the requests from the user to a resolver/cache closest to the user.

According to Wikipedia, Google Public DNS is one of the most widely used and popular DNS server on the Internet handling billions of requests each day from all over the world.

The reason people started to use Google DNS (in my opinion) is that it was an easy to remember IP address (8.8.8.8), it worked reliably from all ISPs and most importantly, they no longer needed to setup and maintain an DNS server of their own anymore. In other words, it delivered a significant convenience over existing methods of running or configuring a DNS resolver. Since Google setup their DNS servers all over the world, as a part of their “Google Edge Network” (essentially a Content Delivery Network - CDN), these servers responded really fast and there was not much loss of latency from using a DNS resolver/cache on the local network.

Today the use of Google Public DNS has really proliferated. So much so that most people are not even mindful of the possibility of running their own local DNS resolver & cache! Most young system admins today (as well as ISP technicians who come and setup your new broadband connection) even configure Google DNS by default in their routers and hence, that is what users in a home or small office (or even large office) scenario end up using. And this usage is not out of deliberate choice or careful decision making - but simply because this is something that works well, is known to work well and hence, there is no need to consider other alternatives.

This is how we have ended up loosing control over DNS. Let us now explore the dark side of using Google DNS.

Problems with using Google DNS

You might question the need for all this discussion. After all, there is a little bit of Google in everyone’s life! What difference is a simple DNS resolver going to make? Lets examine this.

Google is essentially a company which offers to organise the world’s information in a manner that is usable and useful to you. It does so by indexing websites and content of all sorts and then wrapping this index with a search engine so that you can locate relevant information quickly. How does Google know something is relevant or useful or popular? It tracks what people click on (in search results) or watch (on Youtube, for example). It rates content based on a variety of parameters (not just content) and then presents it to you in a way it thinks would be most relevant to you.

How does Google make its search results more relevant to us?

When you’re searching for the phone number for a coffee shop in your city or locality, it won’t return the details of a similarly named coffee shop in another city or country…. and it can do this because it knows where you are (based on your IP address or the wireless network you’re connected to or your GPS location), what type of device you are using to make this query (mobile v/s desktop) and how you might want to use this information (to make a phone call or to visit a website or see a rating and so on).

In a way, Google is manipulating the information it feels is most useful to you and usually, that works just fine for most of us.

The key to all this help that Google offers us is, however, its ability (and need) to track what we do on the Internet. This tracking includes its ability to record your search queries (and tie them in to your name, email address, gender, employer, location, operating system etc) and your internet visits (which websites you visit, how often, in which sequence etc). Which each application / website you use on the Internet might use its own log and tracker, Google is pervasive enough to know at least some details.

Google DNS, tracking and Ad serving

Hence, if you use Google DNS at home or at work, Google can capture details about which domain names are popular, which domains send out (or receive) most email, which domain names are more frequently visited (or queried) from a certain location (or city, or country) and so on. By offering this free-of-charge and extremely convenient service, Google can now track the world’s Internet usage and further use this information to organise, classify and present content to you using its search engine.

This is not problematic in itself, of course. Why wouldn’t we expect Google to do such a thing (given that they are essentially a company who’s business model is that of serving ads)? How is it Google’s use of this information different from another ISPs? Is this an established way of life now - where we trade privacy for some convenience?

Google DNS and Email

Think of another aspect. Lets say a computer is infected with a virus and is trying to access a bunch of websites on the Internet. In such cases, two types of information can be captured by Google DNS – the source of the virus (at least the network or ISP or location) and the details of the DNS queries that the virus is trying to make. These details can then go into the Google Gmail product for further strengthening their anti-virus and anti-spam system – enabling them to deliver a cleaner mailbox to you.

While this might be a positive outcome of the fact that Google runs the mail service, the DNS service and the search service, it also offers them the ability to do such spam classification based on IP addresses and domain names at an unprecedented level! Who else can match the extent of information that they can track and record?

Google’s DNS Privacy Policy

No matter what your perspective might be, the truth is that some details about you are definitely going to be permanently stored with Google for, at least, some time whenever you use Google DNS to resolve a name. Check out their Public DNS privacy policy on this aspect for more details. Here is a summary of the relevant parts:

google-privacy-policy

Are we really ready to trade our privacy for saving the 300 seconds that it might take for us to setup a local, private and self-hosted DNS server?

This is something that we must think about and decide for ourselves. Do you want our Internet usage to provide inputs to Google in its all too-important mission to organise, index and serve the world’s information?

Enter CloudFare’s DNS Service</h3>

A lot of these thoughts were triggered by Cloudfare’s launch of what they call their “privacy-focussed public DNS” service. They questioned the status quo and launched an equally convenient service that seeks to offer more privacy and improved performance as well. (Cloudfare is, after all, a CDN as well! Rolling out such a service globally would be easier for them.) They say that they don’t log any user IP addresses, that they anonymise any information that they might store (for telemetry and performance measurements, for example) and they don’t share this information by any third parties (apart from APNIC - who they’ve partnered with to launch this service).

The difference between Cloudfare and Google DNS would that be that even if Google did not share its DNS related tracking information with third parties, it could (would?) share it with its own search engine. The search engine is no third party for Google.

So should we all shift to use 1.1.1.1 as our default DNS servers now? Is the Cloudfare approach the best thing to have? Can we trust Cloudfare to live up to its “social contract” forever in future? I really don’t know. But if you are now more aware of these concerns, I have a pair of suggestions to offer.

What is the best solution?

The absolute best thing to do would be to self-host your own DNS resolver. These are extremely simple services to deploy, host and secure. They don’t need power servers either. A simple Rs 800 (US$ 11) wireless router is powerful enough to do this job for a small network. Or you could even use a desktop computer or a Raspberry Pi or server.

There are a variety of Free Software tools that enable you to do this. dnscache is one of them. Another one is called dnsmasq and it is extremely simple to configure and deploy. A more heavy weight solution is to use named (BIND). Almost all GNU/Linux distributions ship with these tools by default.

If you can not deploy an additional device to serve local DNS for your network, then the next best option might be to use a public DNS system that promises some privacy. Cloudfare’s offering might be one of the options available. I am sure there are many more that you can find and use.

Should we all stop using Google DNS then?

Sure. If you can do that, that’s a good first step to opt-out of being tracked. It is not a very complex choice to make. If you are responsible for making such choices, please do that. If you know someone who is authorized to make these choices, encourage them to understand these issues and then make a smart choice.

On what basis do I make these claims?

The claims and explanations above are based completely on my inference and not on facts that I am personally aware of. The conclusions that I arrive at above should be true given the premises and assumptions that I have based them upon. But then again, I do not possess factual information about this.

However, it is definitely not going to hurt you to self-host your DNS resolver and cache.





© 2018, Abhas Abhinav.

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