Extensively trimming:

To be honest, this thread has gotten so long that I've lost
track of the various changes being proposed, so here's
my comments on the text as a whole.


> "An increasing number of applications are offering
> application-specific encrypted DNS resolution settings, rather than
> defaulting to using only the system resolver.  A variety of heuristics
> and resolvers are available in different applications including
> hard-coded lists of recognized DoH/DoT servers.

As I said earlier, I think this text is highly misleading.
There are at least two major loci of filtering via DNS:

1. In the operating system itself via the system resolver
   or hooks into that resolver.

2. In the network via (a) the selected resolver or (b) on-path
   filtering of the traffic to/from that resolver.

There are least three major application resolution technologies that
render one or more of these techniques ineffective:

1. Using an application-level resolver which uses the system settings
   [what Chrome currently does] bypasses (1)

2. Using an application-level resolver which uses DoH/DoT to the
   system configured resolver [what Edge and Chrome are experimenting
   with] bypasses (1) and maybe 2(b) if the network config gets out of
   sync (i.e., you don't want your system configured resolver to do
   DoH/DoT if you use network-level filtering, but it's easy to see
   how this can happen if (for instance) you just offer the the user
   the ISP resolver and they start supporting DoH/DoT

3. Using an application-level resolver which uses DoH/DoT to
   an application-selected resolver [as in the Firefox TRR
   system] bypasses all of these.

The key point is that a lot of filtering is broken by reasons
that have nothing to do with encrypted transport, and so
this text is misleading.


> For users to have the ability to manage the DNS resolver settings for
> each individual application in a similar fashion to the OS DNS
> settings, each application would need to expose the default settings
> to the user, provide a configuration interface to change them, and
> support configuration of user specified resolvers.

This seems sort of true, though of course in some systems (I don't
know how common this is in the world of mostly single-user computers)
users actually can't change the system resolver settings.


> The system resolver resolution path is sometimes used to configure
> additional DNS controls e.g. query logging, domain based query
> re-direction or filtering.

This conflates the network and in-OS filtering discussed above,
which I really think needs expansion.


> If all of the applications used on a given device can be configured to
> use the system resolver, such controls need only be configured on the
> system resolver resolution path. However if applications offer neither
> the option to use the system resolver nor equivalent
> application-specific DNS controls then users should take note that for
> queries generated by such an application they may not be able to
>
> * directly inspect the DNS queries (e.g. if they are encrypted), or
>
> * manage them to set DNS controls across the device which are
>   consistent with the system resolver controls.

OK.


> Note that if a client device is compromised by a malicious
> application, the attacker can use application-specific DNS resolvers,
> transport and controls of its own choosing. ยป

This seems opaque. Why not say "then any DNS-based controls may be
ineffective."

-Ekr
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