On Jul 7, 2014, at 8:24 AM, John Kristoff <[email protected]> wrote:
>> by implication, then, the remainder of possible problem statement
>> material is "hide question from on-wire surveillance", there being no
>> way to hide the questioner or the time. to further narrow this, the
>> prospective on-wire surveillance has to be from third parties who are
>> not also operators of on-path dns protocol agents, because any second
>> party could be using on-wire surveillance as part of their logging
>> solution, and by (2) above there is no way to hide from them. so we're
>> left with "hide question from on-wire surveillance by third parties."
> 
> This sounds like DNSCurve's approach.

One important observation:  ONLY the path between the client and the recursive 
resolver in the classic model substantially benefits from channel security.

Even if you wave a magic wand and all resolver<->authority communication 
becomes protected with 0-cost, 100% perfect data encryption, basic traffic 
analysis will largely be able to determine which domains are being looked up.  
Individual names within the domain are protected, but that is relatively minor.

The other problem is DNS is used to guide endpoint communication.  Between the 
resolver<->authority information leak, and the actual IP selected by the 
endpoint itself for communication, this allows a nation-state observer 
adversary to pretty much recover what the hostname was in question in many 
cases, and at least the domain in almost all cases.

--
Nicholas Weaver                  it is a tale, told by an idiot,
[email protected]                full of sound and fury,
510-666-2903                                 .signifying nothing
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